Out of India The Globe’s Stephanie Nolen reflects on being a student of India – and what she’s learned over five years about the fate of a critical superpower

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couple of days after I moved to India in November, 2008, A a public relations official from UNICEF took me out for a fancy lunch (which, alas, doesn’t happen to foreign correspondents nearly as often as you might think.)

We went to a restaurant with white walls and exposed brick, and ate Japanese food with lacquered chopsticks – it was all very New India. Over lunch, she mentioned, almost in passing, that nearly half of Indian children are malnourished, and that that statistic hadn’t changed one bit, despite the fact that the country had posted 10 per cent economic growth for nearly a decade.

“Wait, what?” I said, putting down my chopsticks. “Why not?” And so a few days later I was on a train into the heart of Old India – to rural Madhya Pradesh, the district with some of the highest child malnutrition rates anywhere in the world, higher even than African countries with chronic cycles of famine – to try to figure out why not.

In many ways, what I saw in that village was familiar to me from years of reporting on food crises in Ethiopia and Malawi. Babies with limbs like twigs; empty grain boxes; kids who looked five years old but told me they were actually 10; despairing, weary mothers. But Malawi has no booming economy, and its government isn’t pouring billions of dollars into social welfare schemes like India.

I was stumped by that village, and by the question of why malnutrition persists in superpower India.

(cont.) THE GLOBE AND MAIL Presents: Out of India

In the end, the answers I started to piece together – you’ll read them in the following pages – began a line of inquiry, a fascination, that shaped all the rest of my years in India.

I also covered big business deals and plenty of hard news here. But the stories that drove me as a reporter – and the ones that elicited the strongest response from readers – were about something else, the country we don’t see on the “Incredible India” billboards or hear nearly as much about.

These stories, a baker’s dozen of which are collected here, examine the twin forces of caste and gender and all the painful ways that they continue to shape life for so many Indians. They are stories from a side of India that I had to work to see, to struggle to decipher, and they are the best tool that I think I can provide to readers who seek to understand this critically important nation.

I was supported and enlightened by a great many kind people in my time in India, and I am grateful for their patience – particular thanks to Sudha Varghese, Harsh Mander, Tripta Narang and Katherine Hay. My gratitude also to the many Globe and Mail editors and colleagues who backed and enhanced the Breaking Caste project, and helped me to share the remarkable story of the girls over the years. Prerna – “the school called inspiration” – was mine.

Stephanie Nolen July, 2013 New Delhi, India THE GLOBE AND MAIL Presents: Out of India

CONTENTS

A school called inspiration 6

Land of the rising son 18

If India is booming, why are its children still starving? 25

India’s troubling miracle 35

What’s better than a miracle school for ‘untouchable’ girls? Two schools, for a start 44

Two is enough 56

Dying to get ahead 65

Sister Sudha’s dilemma: You can unlock the potential of India’s most oppressed girls, but they still have to find a place to use it 72

Dowry schemes lure girls into bonded labour 83

The dire straits of being single and female in India 90

Girls interrupted 95

Can horror over rape change a culture? 103

Rape victim’s death renews anger, sorrow, and calls for change 106

Five years in India: False miracles and real inspiration 109 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

PHOTO: CANDACE FEIT

A school called inspiration

More than 40 years ago, a teenager in India began a lifelong journey that took her far from her comfortable home to be with the poorest, most reviled “untouchables.” Eventually she created a school where outcast girls, the lowest of the low, can learn everything from math, Hindi and English to championship karate – and, most of all, self-esteem. But when they graduate, will their country have a place for them? Stephanie Nolen reports, in the first of a series The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

DANAPUR, BIHAR, INDIA – The sky is still dark, with silent envy as she sets off; the respon- the air still cool, when Poonam is roused by sibility is immense. the shrill blast of the housemother’s whis- But Poonam, at 15, brims with confidence: tle. Tousle-haired, her face crinkled with She will get her high-school diploma, then sleep, she bundles her bedroll and shuffles go to university and get a bachelor’s degree. with her friends out of their crowded dorm And then she will be a teacher, she says - and to the lawn. the best kind, who always takes the time Still yawning, she takes her place in the to make sure students understand. In Poo- front row of three ragged lines and begins nam’s whole community, there are only 10 to swing her arms and legs. This half-hour people who can read, but she is undeterred. of exercise wakes her, and she is giggling “If I try, I can be and I can do anything,” by the time the girls head back inside. She she says one evening. She sits with a few fills a small plastic tub from a hand pump other girls in the circle of a lone light bulb, and gives herself a quick bucket bath. Then, eking out a last hour of study. Her voice is back at her bunk, she lifts her uniform filled with conviction. “If I don’t try, I won’t from its small steel case, smooths its pleats be able. But trying will take me far.” and puts it on: knee socks, grey kilt, white It is a beautiful idea - beautiful, and com- blouse, heavy shoes. Biting her lower lip, pletely unfounded. she wedges her long hair back in two bar- There’s a popular image of India today, rettes. of technology start-ups, call centres, film She lines up for a plate of bread and daal sets, even a space program - the emerging and a steel cup of watery yogurt, and eats superpower in the business pages, the one squatted on the veranda out front, her Hindi the government splashes on its “Incredible notebook propped in front of her for some !ndia” billboards. last review. But Poonam lives in another India, one By 7 a.m., she is on her way - her pink she shares with three-quarters of her 1.2 bil- glasses perched on her button nose and her lion fellow citizens. backpack pulling down her shoulders - out In the official India, “untouchability” - the the gate of the girls school and up the road. social exclusion of Dalits, the people at the Of the 125 girls here, Poonam has shown bottom of the Hindu caste system - is an herself one of the brightest, and rupees have antiquated, illegal practice, countered with been saved to send her and a few others to a plethora of affirmative-action schemes. private school. The rest of the girls watch But in Poonam’s India, caste is still rigidly

7 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india enforced, in her village and most other rural about Bihar, a state far to the north. There, areas. It’s the India where a million girls she reads, the people are so poor that they have gone “missing” in the past six years be- sleep by the roadsides, in mean little huts or cause of sex-selective abortion, and where no shelter at all. female work-force-participation rates are The girl puts the magazine down and tries among the lowest in the world. to picture it. Her parents own a plantation, Poonam is a Dalit and a girl in India’s where they grow ginger and rice and pep- poorest state. The odds stacked against her per. They are not rich, but they are prosper- are immense. ous. The workers on their farm have less, of It is an article of faith here that urban- course, but her parents pay them well, they ization and economic growth are bringing have sturdy houses and she plays with their greater equality. For some people, in the children in the yard after school some days. biggest cities, this is indisputably true. But She tries to picture people so poor they Poonam is the acid test: In her India, in her must sleep at the roadside. She can’t.. And lifetime, will it ever be enough just to work she decides, in that moment, that she will hard and have a dream? one day go to see for herself. This story starts long before Poonam One year later, that girl, Sudha Varghese, came to school. It starts in 1964, in an airy set out on the four-day train journey north. classroom in a whitewashed Catholic school In a quietly radical act, the first of many, she in the lush heart of Kerala, the southern- joined a Roman Catholic religious order, most state of India. the Sisters of Notre Dame, which worked on Another teenage schoolgirl, this one education in Bihar. By becoming a nun, she lanky but strong, is hunched at her desk: was taking the sole path that would allow The teacher has left the room, but she is an Indian woman, then or indeed even now, oblivious to the hubbub of chattering girls to live as a woman alone, single and inde- that has erupted around her. She has in her pendent, for the rest of her life. hands a magazine - a precious thing, some- She spent a few years training at the Notre thing the girls only see a few times in a year. Dame Mother House in Patna, the Bihari This one is from the Mission League, and it capital - she had to learn English and Hindi, tells of the work being done in other parts of the language of the north; prepare for tak- India by nuns and priests who work among ing her vows of poverty, chastity and obedi- the poor. ence; and learn the basic skills of teaching The article that has caught her attention is and social work.

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But Patna was disappointing. While Bihar Hindu before converting to Christianity was far poorer than Kerala, life in the Moth- many generations before, although they er House was soporifically comfortable. So, never talked about it. The labourers on their in just a couple of years, Sister Sudha struck farm came from the Dalit community, but out on her own: “I wanted to be with the she was raised sharing meals with them. poor - and not just the poor, but the very Bihar was an alien world, the one she had poorest among them,” she says. “So I went been seeking. She travelled out of the capi- to the Mushahar.” tal for a couple of hours to the tola - Musha- The name means “rat eaters” - a sneer har settlement - of Jamsaut, and asked if she at the people at the bottom of the caste could stay. system. In a rigidly segregated society, the “I was looking for a people and I found Mushahar are deemed by dint of birth to be them,” she says. the most reviled, below even the “manual scavengers” whose traditional job is to col- A look or touch that ‘pollutes’ lect excrement from people’s homes and carry it away in baskets on their heads. The idea of “untouchability” - that some The Mushahar are found mainly in the people are so “polluted” simply by virtue north Indian states of Bihar and Uttar of the family into which they are born, that Pradesh; elsewhere, this bottom-caste posi- they cannot be touched, sit or eat with oth- tion is reserved for other groups. ers - was laid out in ancient texts of Hindu- Dalits make up 16 per cent of Bihar’s 103 ism, and endured for nearly 2,000 years. million people, and Mushahar are about 15 Organized resistance began in the mid- per cent of Dalits. They are the least literate 1800s and grew slowly; in 1950, India ad- (about one in 100 adults can read), and have opted a new constitution that outlawed the worst health and economic indicators. caste discrimination. New affirmative- ac- Almost without exception, Mushahar own tion quotas were meant to give the former no land, have no job but occasional farm “untouchables” - who began to call them- labour, and are made to live apart from the selves Dalit, a Sanskrit-derived word for “the rest of the community - to the southwest, so broken people” - access to education and to wind that blows over them does not touch government jobs. the rest of the village. Today, Dalits make up a sixth of India’s Sister Sudha had known about caste, of population, about 170 million people. In course; her family was likely high-caste the biggest cities, many Dalits have been

9 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india able to leave untouchability behind. India’s There were no latrines, and modesty dic- President is a Dalit woman; so is the chief tated that women could make this trip only minister of the largest state. In cities, Dalits in the dark. can attend schools, buy tea at a café,and live Much of village life shocked her: Every- where they like, although individual land- thing was grimy, muddy, covered in flies lords may turn them away when they hear that feasted on the animal waste and food their surnames. scraps tossed in the lanes, and no one had But in rural India - where 70 per cent of the habit of washing. the country’s population lives - the great “But slowly, slowly,” she says, “these majority of Dalits are landless workers; things moved away and I began to see the they make up the bulk of the population in children.” She started with simple things: bonded labour. A national survey in 2006 gathering women in the evenings around a found that in more than half of the villages, small fire and talking to them about hygiene Dalits were not permitted to enter non-Dalit and the health of their bodies and their houses, to enter places of worship, to share children. She taught the alphabet to chil- non-Dalits’ food or use the same barbers or dren who couldn’t go to the school in the laundry services. dominant-caste section of the village. So it is hard to overstate how bizarre Sister Still, she saw herself as the student. “I was Sudha’s arrival seemed to the people of the a beginner with regard to being in this com- tola - this young woman in her crisp, clean munity and being with the people, learning sari, who did not shrink from their gaze or their culture, learning to accept them and their touch, but stepped inside their settle- also to really fashion my life so that I will ment and asked to stay. become part of them.” In a pattern of generosity that would last Only very slowly did she set out to pass an for decades, they gave her a home - first, idea back - that, as excluded as the people of she shared a tumbledown hut, but when the tola were, they had rights. more children came and the family needed When they worked all day in the fields of the space, she slept in a grain storage shed. a landlord who then scoffed and refused “I got used to curving my body around the them the 30 cents they were promised, she circle of the bins,” she recalls. led them back to sit, silently and peacefully, The largest adjustment was learning to in his yard, until they were paid. She gath- wake at 4 a.m. so she could go with the ered children and took them to school, and women into the fields to relieve themselves: went back every day to make sure they were

10 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india allowed to sit on benches, not confined to to end caste inequality. windowsills or the floor, and to touch books There are others in India who practise Sis- like other children. ter Sudha’s style of integrated grassroots ac- She told her neighbours that their chil- tivism, such as Aruna Roy, who spearheaded dren were entitled to a government stipend the anti-corruption Right to Information to pay for school books and uniforms, and movement; her husband, Bunker Roy, who that they could insist that police investigate founded the Barefoot College to educate the dominant-caste village-council mem- poor, rural women; and Murlidhar Amte bers who had pocketed the funds. (“Baba”), a social worker who spent decades She stayed for 21 years. living with and advocating for lepers. It was not a religious mission. “It’s a These activists tend to come from privi- purely humanitarian exercise,” she says. leged backgrounds but spend their working “Wherever I see there is something lacking lives closely tied to impoverished com- in them being a fully human being, I like to munities, working for education and social support them and see that they reach their development. But there are only a handful full human good - so that is my purpose.” of stories quite like Sister Sudha’s, of living This philosophy places her in a tradi- on the margins for decades, pushing for the tion of Indian public service that is often most incremental change. called Gandhian, but with a respectful tilt of her head to the Mahatma, Sister Suhda ‘It’s all her doing’ rejects that label. Instead, like many of the Dalits, she holds as her inspiration Bhimrao As years passed, Jamsaut’s women became Ambedkar, a Dalit who became a lawyer in Sister Sudha’s focus. She had realized that the 1920s, led the fight against untouchabil- rape was ubiquitous. “No one practises ity and drafted India’s constitution. untouchability when it comes to sex,” she Ambedkar nearly succeeded in setting snaps. up a separate electoral system for Dalits, Or to drinking - higher-caste men would arguing they could never have real political come at night to drink the date moonshine power in a system privileged castes would the Mushahar men brewed, then help them- inevitably dominate. But Gandhi foiled that, selves to the women, who had nowhere to threatening a fast unto death if Dalits were hide. given their own system. Many still begrudge The men rarely protested, because they him that, and his larger failure to do more relied on the income, and the women felt

11 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india helpless. But mothers began to confide in ... I was frightened. But I decided I could not Sister Sudha - stories they told her in de- show it.” spair, for what recourse did they have? Gradually, Sister Sudha’s work became a Finally, one day in 1992, when a young girl small empire, which she called Nari Gunjan, had been brutally gang-raped, Sister Sudha or Women’s Voice. Using funds scraped to- took her and her mother to the police sta- gether from her parents and siblings - who tion. When the police refused to register thought she was mad but wanted to help a case - “no one would rape a woman in - and a bit from the community itself, she clothes so dirty,” they said - the women sat started an educational centre where Musha- there on a bench, all through the night and har girls could get a basic education and the next day, until finally the disgusted po- some income-generating skills. lice took the report. And Sister Sudha kept A Unicef staffer happened to see it, and pushing the police until they arrested the arranged a grant of a few thousand dollars. men in question. So Sister Sudha expanded to 50 educational By then, authorities had begun to dread centres across rural Bihar, where girls and the sight of her, for now she spoke the lan- groups of older women learned about sani- guage of the law. Frustrated that the legis- tation, reproductive health and their rights. lation meant to protect the Mushahar was She travelled the state, supervising it all on never implemented, she had decided in 1987 a bicycle - “the cycle sister,” they called her. to take on the legal system. Eventually, she says, she had simply “I saw the people in my village all the time become Mushahar. She planned to stay being duped - the high-caste people would forever. But in 2005, some teenage Musha- say, ‘You have to pay for this or for that har boys were attacked by dominant-caste document,’ or ‘You have no right to this or young men. The boys filed a police case to that.’” - and the wrath of the assailants’ families For three years, she commuted to law came down on Sister Sudha. school in Bangalore; she aced her exams She protested that she hadn’t even known and became an advocate. about the incident. But ultimately, she was In the next two years, she registered nine behind it, from all her years of convinc- rape cases. “There were a lot of threats. ing the Mushahar that they had rights. The They were ready to finish me off - ‘It’s all her families made it known that she should doing: Which Mushahar ever files a case? disappear or they would do it for her. The Which Mushahar ever went to the police?’ police said they could not protect her - or

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Prerna School for Mahadalit Girls in Danapur, Bihar. PHOTO: CANDACE FEIT would not. regularity - herding livestock, gathering fire- Heartsick, she put a padlock on her wood- wood, minding baby siblings or transplant- en door in Jamsaut and went back to the ing rice seedlings in the paddies. convent in Patna. She lasted just days on its Sister Sudha resolved to build a residence, smooth floors and soft beds: “I could not a hostel where girls from all the tolas could survive there.” She decided that the time come and stay and have no job but to learn. had come to concentrate on a new project. She would build them a home where, in- Girls, she had concluded, were the key to stead of the all-purpose “Mushahar,” people change for the Mushahar. To be a girl in the would call them by their names. lowest caste is to be the person of the least value in every community, in every state. Prerna is born Until their lives changed, there could be no real talk of change in the country. In Lal Kothi, near the outskirts of Patna, The girls needed education, but could she found a place. It was half public latrine never study in the villages. Even when they and half water-buffalo shed, but the state were permitted entry to school, they had government helped her repair it, and, with too much else to do to attend with any donations and volunteer labour, the stink-

13 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india ing, derelict building became a two-storey a schedule, and bathing, and three meals dormitory with a kitchen and a small, open every day - she did not have to wait until the study space. men, boys and adult women were finished She named it the Prerna Residential and eat their scraps. She could even be first School for Mahadalit Girls - prerna is Hindi in line with her plate. Within months, she for inspiration. had shot up several inches and developed The first girls arrived in 2006. Parents rounded arms and legs. She had glasses that were anxious - they wanted their children helped her read. The hours of studying were to be educated, but it was a shocking idea to an almost unimaginable luxury. send a young, unmarried girl away on her But the nights were unnerving, so far from own. Often, mothers had to mount sus- the familiar noises of the village; girls whis- tained campaigns to persuade fathers and pered about ghosts and demons. To soothe mothers-in-law. fears, Sister Sudha has them line up each “In almost every case,” Sister Sudha says, night to sing a prayer - a non-denomination- “the mother is the critical thing that makes al one, as she is fanatical there be no Chris- change possible.” tian prayers or any other religion’s. From Jamsaut, Poonam’s parents sent “No matter how dark my way, I will trust her. She was 10, or maybe 9 or 8 - no one in you and you will help me continue,” the had ever asked. She was half the height of girls sing, in Hindi, to an unnamed god. a Canadian girl her age. She did not own “Help that I think not of what I have re- shoes. She had a perpetual squint, and had ceived but be more conscious of what I can never seen a doctor, let alone had her eyes give.” checked. At home, when she bathed, it was Sister Sudha had planned to send the girls, by accident, in the ponds where the children who now numbered 125, to the government chased the buffalos. school next door. But like so many others in She had never used a latrine. She had India, it was a disaster: The teachers seldom never slept on a mattress. She was in Grade showed up, and when they did, they sat gos- 5 - she’d attended school when she wasn’t siping on the veranda. On a good day, they working with her parents - but had never might write a lesson on the board before owned a book. they walked out. The children were left to The hostel was a strange new world: puzzle out the mysteries of subtraction or Poonam had never paid attention to the the alphabet alone. After a semester, the hours of the day before. Here, there was girls had learned nothing.

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PHOTO: LANA SLEZIC

So she pulled them out. For a dozen of wanted the girls to learn to sing and draw the brightest, she scraped together the and paint. They asked for dance class. And money, $200 each a year, to send them to a she hunted up a karate teacher. private school up the road. There were no “Karate, I felt, would give them more other Dalits at the school, but the director self-confidence, and also self-protection - is a businessman, and a fat envelope of fees because many of these girls, in their homes paid up front quashed any hesitations he and the fields where they go to work, they had. could be victims of sexual and physical For the others, Sudha hired some local, abuse. So karate would give them strength unemployed university graduates as teach- to protect themselves” - and maybe to fight ers. Squashing together the bunk beds, she back. cleared a couple of rooms and started a The girls took to it. In fact, this year, 20 school of her own. She followed the govern- of them travelled to the national competi- ment curriculum, but bolstered it too: She tion in Gujarat - the first time they had ever

15 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india been anywhere besides the school and their the Bihar version of The Boy Who Cried villages. They won gold or silver in nearly Wolf, it’s a lion instead, and after the third every category, a sweep so astonishing that time the boy calls “lion!” it eats him. Poo- Bihar’s chief minister summoned them and nam sighs and hastily turns that page. offered to send the winners to world cham- It’s hot in the dormitory, with not even a pionships in Japan. breath of wind through the iron grills on the Sister Sudha found herself organizing windows. The smaller girls tumble on their passports and plane tickets for seven girls bedrolls, telling secrets and playing check- who, a year before, had never even been in ers. A few fall asleep. an auto-rickshaw. In Tokyo, they gawked at But at dusk a whistle blows again, and the skyscrapers, the gleaming white-tiled Poonam joins the others as they gather on hotel bathroom and the machine in the the school field for free-form games of tag, dining room that hissed out Coke or coffee. tackling and races. They move with a free- They came home with seven trophies. dom and unself-consciousness that would But something else surprised them most: be unthinkable in the village. No one is “They were so astonished by how much re- watching. No one will seize their arms and spect people showed them,” she says. “They angrily remind them what is acceptable for said, ‘Imagine, bowing to me, speaking to Mushahar girls. me, this way.’” Everything they feel the urge to do is acceptable here: When they run, they are Looking strangers in the eye astoundingly fast. When they tackle, they are lethally efficient. And when they laugh, Poonam returns to Prerna from the private they are loud. school at 1:30 in the afternoon, and lunch This has been Sister Sudha’s fundamental is waiting. She changes quickly from her goal, to replace the sense of worthlessness uniform into one of her two dresses, using inculcated in them since birth. a safety pin in place of a broken zipper, as “All that they have known and heard and the dress has had many owners before her. seen is, ‘You are like dirt.’ They have inter- She pauses briefly for lunch: rice, lentils and nalized this: ‘This is my lot,’ they feel. ‘This potatoes. is where I belong. I don’t belong on the Then she takes her books out of her back- chair. I will sit on the floor, and then no one pack, and begins laboriously copying the can tell me to go any lower than that.’ unfamiliar English words of a fairy tale - in “All their lives, they are told, ‘You are the

16 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india last. You are the least. You do not deserve beneath their bunks, tucked in the corners to have.’ They learn very fast to keep quiet, of their mosquito nets and closed their eyes. don’t expect changes and don’t ask for On the concrete steps out front, Sister more.” Sudha sits awake. She knots her grey- At the school, where everyone is focused streaked hair at her neck, loosens it distract- on the girls’ well-being and achievements, edly, knots it again, and tries to envision a she shows them they are worth more. As future for her girls. soon as they step outside its walls, someone Their lives have undergone unthinkable mutters, “Mushahar,” and they are remind- changes in a few years, but their families ed they are untouchable. and their villages are not changing nearly as But by helping them to explore new fast. “It will be really a challenge for them to things and excel, Sister Sudha hopes that meet even their own family, their own sister they will come to know at a visceral level who did not study here,” she says. that they are as good as others, and some- These are the ideas that plague Sister times, even better. Sudha: Where will they go when they leave? The constant subtle reinforcement has What is it realistic to think they can do? had a profound effect. The girls stand “In the hostel, we are here to protect straight. They gleam with health. Their them. But they won’t always have someone pale blue dupattai are pinned precisely on to fight for them or protect them. They have the shoulders of darker blue kameez. Their to prepare themselves to face that.” teeth are shiny white. Their braids are tied in fat ribbons. They greet adults with a re- spectful pranam - hands meeting in front of their hearts - and they look strangers in the eye when they say hello. “That takes a long time - when they come here, they are just looking at the ground all the time,” Sister Sudha says quietly. “To get their heads lifted is something.” By 10 p.m., a warm, heavy dark lies over Prerna, and the last giggles have died out in the dorms. Even bookworms such as Poo- nam have stowed their cherished books

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Land of the rising son

Globe and Mail correspondent Stephanie Nolen examines India’s very public battle to halt the shocking decline in the number of girls being born. Technology has made it easy for mothers to choose the gender of their babies. But why, she asks, is the obsession with boys most pronounced among those who are well off? The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

New Delhi – The information is traded in deeply. The richest neighbourhoods in the whispers over cappuccinos in the cafes of country – the wealthy farming areas of the South Delhi and in the locker rooms of sea- Punjab, the middle-class areas of Mumbai side gyms in Mumbai. and other cities, and here, the leafy neigh- That doctor won’t tell. But this one will. bourhoods in the south of the capital – have For a price. the biggest gaps. And once you know, call this clinic – they High-caste families in urban areas of the will help with the “problem.” Punjab have just 300 girls for every 1,000 In India, it has been illegal for 15 years to boys, researchers financed by Canada’s tell a pregnant woman the sex of her fetus – International Development Research Centre and to abort based on gender. (IDRC) reported last year. In South Delhi, it’s And ever since a national census in 2001 832 girls born per 1,000 boys; in the state of found that millions of girls were “missing,” Haryana, home to the high-tech hub of Gur- the government has been throwing money gaon, it’s 822. (In “normal” circumstances, at the problem. There are cash payments demographers expect to find 950 to 1,000 to parents when a girl is born, bursaries girls born for every 1,000 boys). to send girls to school and a cheque on a Conventional wisdom has long held that daughter’s 18th birthday. as India develops – as more families struggle These measures, launched under the slo- their way into the middle class, more girls gan Save the Girl Child, aim to give parents go to school and more women join the work an incentive to have daughters, and a cush- force – traditional ideas about the lesser ion for what is perceived as the exponential- value of girls will erode. The incentive to ly greater cost (a girl will almost certainly abort them would fall away. need a dowry, and will join her husband’s Instead, the opposite has happened, and family, taking her earnings and property the reasons – and solutions – have govern- with her). ment and activists stumped. There are some early signs that these in- “These educated, well-off women, who terventions may be working, in poor fami- still want sons – this is really the crux of lies. the problem and the government has not But $100 on the birth of a girl – or even caught on to it,” says Farah Naqvi, author of $2,500 at her marriage – means nothing to a major study on attitudes to “son prefer- the country’s wealthiest families. And that ence.” is where the gender gulf is yawning most “Yes, you have these very modern women

19 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india today – you see them in spandex at the local est, colonial-era censuses from this region gym ? but it’s a complicated modernity. It’s show skewed gender ratios. Until the 1970s, two worlds these women are straddling.” girls were eliminated through infanticide Women with a Grade 10 education or and neglect. Then, as now, women faced higher are four times as likely to have a sec- immense pressure to produce sons and ond child who is a son, after a first daughter, undertook regular fasts or nightly temple as are women who are illiterate. “These edu- visits in their quest for male children. Then cated, employed women are earning very ultrasound technology was introduced here well, and yet they prefer a son,” says N.B. Sa- in 1975 – at first, in an effort to diagnose fetal rojini, head of SAMA, a health organization abnormalities and illnesses. that tries to help women resist sex-selection But almost immediately it began to be pressure. “Why are rich women worst? If used for sex selection: a high-tech replace- you have a male child, you are more valued ment for offerings made at the temple offer- in society – it’s true in any class.” The cru- ing. Soon, there were newspaper advertise- cial question, she adds, is why that idea has ments offering pregnant women and their proved so immutable. families the test: “Spend 500 rupees now One of the dark ironies of India’s growing to save 500,000 rupees later,” by avoiding a prosperity is that it seems, in many quarters, dowry. to have exacerbated traditional ideas about Ultrasound technology kept getting bet- the cost of girls, rather than changing them. ter, and cheaper. Soon there were mobile “It’s no longer okay to marry your daugh- clinics, which travelled among villages that ter off at 13: You have to give her education, lacked even clean water or electricity, to of- job prospects – the expense of a daughter fer fetal scanning, and abortions. The mo- has been heightened,” says Mary John, bile clinics performed a scan for as little as head of the Centre for Women’s Develop- $12 – which can be a month’s earnings for a ment Studies in New Delhi and an author of landless agricultural labourer, but is viewed the IDRC study. “It’s an unintended conse- as a wise investment compared with the risk quence of modernity.” of an unwanted daughter. In 1994, after sustained campaigns by NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR AN OLD PURPOSE women’s-rights activists, the government made it illegal both to use ultrasound to Son preference has ancient roots in India – determine gender and to tell a parent what as it does in many other countries. The earli- the gender is. The new law said all ultra-

20 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india sound equipment must be registered (with In addition, sex-selection kits (of varying the hypothetical goal of auditing all those effectiveness) are now widely available in who provided the service based on the gen- India for about $300, sold over the Internet der ratio of babies born to their clients) and from countries where they are legal. threatened doctors who did sex determina- In conversations in cafes and other social tion with up to five years in prison. settings, 13 affluent women in Delhi con- But investigations of doctors, who form a firmed that they were told the gender of their powerful political lobby here, have been ex- fetus by doctors at upscale private clinics; ceedingly rare – usually they follow “stings” while some said they were seeking a differ- by journalists – and fewer than a dozen doc- ent “family balance,” none would discuss tors have been convicted. Meanwhile, it is whether she had broken the law and asked common knowledge among families which to terminate a pregnancy. (While the statis- doctors will disclose gender, either directly or tics show the practice is widespread, there is by handing parents pink or blue candy, pens surprising reluctance to discuss it, which may or booties after the scan. indicate a change in attitude to sex selec- The situation has become even more com- tion.) plicated today, with many of India’s almost Two women said doctors who do not ask totally unregulated and ubiquitous fertil- questions about the reason for a termination ity clinics offering gender determination of charge about three times as much – $600 – embryos – creating male embryos to implant for performing the service. in women who want to skip the hassle of get- There are many reasons Indian parents ting pregnant, carrying a fetus for 16 weeks still feel they must have sons. When a Hindu and then aborting. This practice was out- or Sikh parent dies, a son must carry out the lawed in 2004 – but is offered openly in three last rites; if not, the very devout believe they fertility clinics visited by The Globe and Mail. won’t reach heaven. Sons are perceived to In 2007, a wealthy Mumbai couple went to carry on family lineage in a way daughters court to argue that the law against sex deter- cannot. They also live with their parents all mination infringed on their right to “balance their lives, and care for them when old. their family” and have a son, in addition to And then there’s cold, hard economics: the two daughters they had. They said they In the words of a Punjabi proverb, raising a were not going to “destroy” a female fetus, daughter is like watering your neighbour’s but rather use technology to “select” a male garden. Girls leave home at marriage, taking embryo. (The court ruled against them.) whatever skills or assets they have accrued.

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And the practice of dowry, once restricted to government. Son preference endures even the highest castes, has been adopted at all though people in upper income brackets levels of society – as a sign of social status rarely have more than two children, and so – and is nearly universally practised even go to great lengths to ensure they have a though it was outlawed in 1961. (Like the son. law against sex selection, this one seeks to “Sex selection followed by abortion is alter a widely accepted social practice, and a difficult, painful practice that few if any there is little enforcement – in fact, many women would seek out – so you need to feminists argue, government is reinforcing look at the dynamic in this family that the practice by offering cash to unwed girls makes a woman so desperate to have a son on their 18th birthdays.) that she will undergo this pain,” Ms. John In aspirant middle-class families in south says. “If you’re only having one or two, you Delhi today, a typical dowry provided to do need this boy, that’s the perception – the a groom’s family can include a sports car, boy is an investment worth making, and the a large apartment, all its furniture includ- girl, as much as you might love her, she’s go- ing high-end electronics, and thousands of ing to have duties in another family. Call it dollars in clothing. “Increasing materialism rationalization or justification, but these are ? and the emphasis on obtaining consumer the motives.” lifestyle products has exacerbated the prob- Last month, the Delhi government re- lem of dowry,” Ms. Naqvi says. leased new data drawn from birth registra- Navsharan Singh, who heads the gender tions and said triumphantly that the sex program at IDRC’s India office, noted that ratio had actually increased from 820 girls dowry was a way to allow girls to share in born for every 1,000 boys in 2005 to 848 in family property; although India’s inheri- 2008 – which means 19,000 more female tance law was changed two years ago to al- births in 2008 than the year before. The low daughters to inherit, this has yet to have government attributed the gain to its “Laad- had an impact. li” scheme – the Hindi word for darling or beloved – which gives each family with an SMALLER FAMILIES LOWER THE ODDS annual income under $2,500 that same sum when a daughter turns 18. Meanwhile, family size is shrinking across But activists scoffed, calling the numbers all sectors of Indian society – the “small bad statistics (the total number of births re- family norm” is pushed aggressively by ported was down, when in fact it is believed

22 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india to have risen considerably) and saying they cause of the sensitive nature of the subject, actually represented a gross under-reporting noted the large sign – which must, by law, of boy births – many poor women do not be posted – saying sex determination was give birth in hospitals or clinics, and never illegal and not offered there. Five of the 200 register their babies’ births, but the Laadli patients she sees each month are well into scheme gives families with girls a powerful their second trimester, when fetal gender incentive to do so, distorting the numbers. can be confirmed, and claim to already have Either way, the Delhi statistics confirmed daughters. She turns them away, fearing sex- that gender ratios are skewing with growing based termination is their primary motive. affluence: Muslims, the poorest residents, “But others lie, and how can we check? registered 1,040 girls per 1,000 boys. Sikhs They say they have sons already, and came and Christians, the two wealthiest groups, because of contraceptive failure, and that had 873 girls and 875 girls per 1,000 boys. entitles them to abortion ? and there is Ms. Naqvi noted that positive attitudes nothing I can do about that,” she adds. about modern women, who are earning Abortion has been legal in India since their own income and contributing to fami- 1971, and safe and cheap terminations are lies, exist simultaneously with concerns available in government hospitals and about women’s increased independence private clinics, an accepted part of govern- and autonomous decision-making, seen by ment’s “small families” population-control many as negative changes that clash with practice. But the campaign to protect female traditional Indian values, which link family fetuses presents complicated moral ques- honour to the sexual purity of daughters. tions for defenders of reproductive rights: It Her research found that young women uses language such as “defending the rights were most receptive to challenging sex- of the girl child,” but Indian feminists de- selection, but Indian women of any class bate the issue uncomfortably: Is the impli- rarely make decisions about their reproduc- cation that male fetuses do not have rights? tive choices themselves: Husbands and in- Or have different ones? laws are usually intimately involved. Ms. Singh notes an “incoherence” be- At a south Delhi abortion clinic this week, tween a woman’s right to abortion and the for example, five of six patients booked for state’s restricting her from choosing her appointments had been accompanied by child’s gender: “We’ve been struggling with their mothers-in-law. The clinic director, these questions. Choice is individual but the who did not wish to be quoted by name be- consequences are societal, when the rights

23 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india of those who survive are also compromised of women manifest in such violent form: – I’m rendered less wanted and my claims Your very sex is so worthless it’s being as a citizen are less valid.” eliminated.” India’s government seems to be waking HUMAN TRAFFICKING MEETS THE NEED up to the idea that sex selection is not only a practice of the poor: “Growing economic The shortage of potential wives is a subject prosperity and education levels have not of frequent coverage by the Indian media. led to a corresponding mitigation in this And there are alarming stories – particu- acute problem,” Prime Minister Manmo- larly from Punjab and Haryana – of human han Singh said last year. Yet currently there trafficking. Lower-caste women are bought are no policy initiatives – other than soap in states such as Jharkhand, where the sex operas with “feticide” plot lines – aimed at ratio is roughly equal, and then sold for a middle or upper-class women. few hundred dollars in higher-caste com- Ms. John of the Centre for Women’s De- munities. velopment Studies argues that clinic raids, There are also reports of a surge in poly- bursaries and television ads are not going andry – of a single woman “married” to all to stop the sex-ratio slide, when the roots the brothers, or to brothers and uncles, in a of the problem lie in people’s rational deci- family, and kept, essentially, as a sex slave sion-making. “If we have no social security with the sole function of producing sons. system or public health care, and health Media coverage of the “feticide” issue here and education are getting more expensive; is inevitably accompanied by dire predic- if you don’t query marriage norms in our tions that violence against women and society as the successful outcome of parent- other crimes, even terrorism, will rise as ing; if you don’t want to enable daughters frustrated young men lose outlets for their to be strong – these are the things that have sexual urges. to change.” But activists say this analysis misses the real problem. “I hate this argument – I don’t care if men don’t find brides; we’re talking here about missing women,” Ms. Singh says. “What matters are the social and political entitlements of the women who survive – those of us who made it. It’s a devaluation

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PHOTO: ZACKARY CANEPARI If India is booming, why are its children still starving?

After 15 years of rapid growth, India has made no progress on childhood malnutrition, unlike many poorer nations. As Stephanie Nolen reports, its culture poses many special obstacles – but that could also be the key to change

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DEHDE, INDIA – Devsingh Adivasi has baggy malnourished Indian children for three pants. Not literally - in fact, he has no trou- generations to encourage their own chil- sers at all - but that’s the term for a child like dren to eat their crusts or lima beans. In that him: At two years old, he has rolls of slack time, however, India has transformed itself flesh that sag below his buttocks and gather from a land where millions of people died at his ankles, as if his skin was made a few each year in famine to one whose explosive sizes too big. development has won it “emerging super- Devsingh is acutely undernourished. He is power” status. In the last 15 years, India’s less than half the weight or height he should average annual economic growth has been 7 be; he’s not able to stand on his own; he per cent. It’s expected to come close to that is intrigued by the small ball made of reed mark this year even amid the global eco- scraps his mother Papo has rolled for him, nomic crisis. but does not have the energy to chase it. India has a booming information-tech- He has never eaten a vegetable and never nology industry, an exploding middle class eaten a fatty food - never, in fact, eaten any- and cities with sleek subway lines, neigh- thing other than the flat bread his mother bourhood sushi restaurants and rickshaw makes on a cow-dung fire every day or two. drivers who use cellphones. Last year it sent He nurses sometimes at her slack breasts; a rocket to the moon. But there is one thing Papo herself, in her late 20s, weighs about that has not changed - the rate of child- a third less than is healthy. She says, softly, hood malnutrition, which still affects one in that she knows her son gets little milk from five children here and causes 3,000 infant her and that she should eat more. “But what deaths each day. would I eat?” A staggering 40 per cent of undernour- Devsingh is one of six children, all of them ished children in the world are Indian; the malnourished. Each one of the 70 families rate here is twice as high as it is in all of Sub- in this village in the northern Indian state of Saharan Africa and five times higher than Madhya Pradesh has a child, or several, in a in China. The land of the economic boom similar condition. But this is not a blighted finishes third-last on Unicef’s global list of place with a unique, horrible problem. child nourishment, worse than either Sudan What’s most horrifying about it is its nor- or Ethiopia. In fact, the number of starving malcy, across this state and across northern children is increasing 2.5 per cent annually, India. while population growth is barely 1.4 per Canadian parents have been invoking cent.

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India’s government itself professes shock stark powerlessness of Indian women. that the situation has not improved as the The Adivasis share their surname, derived economy has grown. “The problem of malnu- from their group in the Hindu caste system, trition is a matter of national shame,” Prime with their whole village. They are what’s Minister Manmohan Singh said last year. called a “tribal” group - an indigenous popu- There is a growing sense that the scale of the lation at the very bottom of the traditional problem does not befit a country claiming hierarchy. They own no land, and the soil on superpower status. the land they have been allotted is rocky and “It is embarrassing,” acknowledges Mahesh infertile and rain is rare. Their village is a jar- Arora, who heads the national child-nutri- ring hour’s drive (not that anyone here owns tion program through the Ministry of Women a vehicle) down a dirt track off a rural road and Child Development. “We are trying our down a lousy highway that leads only to a level best. You must realize India is a huge small town with no industry or opportunity. country and some areas are doing much bet- No one here in Dehde has a toilet or a ter than others.” source of clean water to wash their hands; Better is a relative term. In the north and they are, like half of all Indians, “open defeca- east, at least 55 per cent of children are mal- tors” who walk into the surrounding fields nourished; in the south it is about 30 per to relieve themselves. Their children run and cent. The Adivasi family lives in the worst of play surrounded by excrement and as a con- the worst areas, and what happens in their sequence suffer episodes of life-threatening house - and what doesn’t - does much to ex- diarrhea nearly every month. plain why the problem persists. There is a school in the village, but as in The family has some of the basic problems many other parts of India’s corrupt and poor- that plague people around the world, hav- ly-managed public education system, the ing no land, no assets, no cash to buy food underpaid teacher shows up only a few times nor any real way to change their situation. As each month; looking around, it isn’t difficult elsewhere, efforts to help the very poor here to understand why he might be hopelessly have been marred by corruption and mis- discouraged. There is not a single literate management. But these ills are exacerbated adult in Dehde. by a collection of factors peculiar to India, There is a community health worker, from a squabble over the philosophical lega- 50-year-old Battu Bai, who is paid $36 a cy of Mahatma Gandhi to intractable battles month by the central government to weigh over caste hierarchy to the uncommonly the children and keep track of their growth.

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She enlists a couple of 12-year-olds, the only a toll on their own health and leading to people here who are numerate, to read the weaker babies. scale and fill in her charts. She is supposed If these children survive infancy, they to exhort the mothers of underweight chil- grow up stunted - no one in the Adivasi dren into proper feeding but, she says, roll- family is more than five feet tall. In fact, ing her eyes: “I am hammering them all the research by the World Health Organization time but the men are the decision makers showed definitively last year that the idea and it doesn’t matter what I say.” that Asians are inherently shorter than peo- Ms. Bai does not have the skills or the re- ple in the West is nonsense and the dispar- sources to treat the diarrhea that claims so ity is primarily the result of broad, chronic many children here each year. She can only intergenerational malnutrition. refer families to the clinics in the regional The children are not just stunted physi- capital of Shivpuri, two hours away. But few cally. They experience delays in cognitive have money for transport and, she says, the development that can never, at any later men aren’t interested in making the trip point, be repaired. This has consequences and forbid their wives to go alone with sick for India as a nation: The World Bank says children. that undernutrition is reducing the coun- “Who would cook, or see to the other try’s GDP growth by three per cent each children?” grumbles Devsingh’s father, year, as it reduces any individual’s lifetime Prashadi, when Ms. Bai asks him yet again earning potential by at least 10 per cent. about having his wife Papo take their child Like Ms. Adivasi, a third of Indian women to a Unicef emergency-nutrition centre. are themselves underweight. In addition, 59 per cent of pregnant women here are Stunted lives anemic, which means they give birth to low-birth-weight babies with weak immune In Dehde, poverty is a congenital condition. systems who struggle to breastfeed properly. Papo, who has tawny hair that spills in curls In fact, breastfeeding - a free, critical down her back, married Mr. Adivasi when intervention that can make a massive dif- she was 17. She gave birth to their first child ference in survival past the first month of a year later. A full 20 per cent of pregnan- life - is a fraught part of the nutrition puzzle cies in India are in girls between 15 and 19; a here. Ms. Adivasi says that she waited until quarter of those, like Ms. Adivasi, give birth three days after Devsingh was born to nurse at intervals of less than 18 months, taking her son. For the first two days, which Unicef

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calls the most critical for determining infant for up to three months. But when they begin health, she gave him nothing, believing her to fuss, wanting more nutrients than their colostrum (the antibody-rich, yellow liquid malnourished mothers can apparently pro- new mother’s bodies produce before milk) vide, fathers or mothers-in-law often insist was unhealthy. that nursing women introduce solid food or Overhearing her recount this, a couple of buffalo milk, diluted with unclean water - village men jump into the discussion: “Even even though babies should be given breast an animal would not feed its child with its milk exclusively for their first six months. first milk!” one man says. Another adds, In other geographic and caste groups, “No woman here would be allowed to give people believe in breastfeeding exclusively that to a baby.” far, far past that point - even up to two years. This, too, is nutritionally damaging: After about six months, children need solid food sources of vitamins and nutrients. “It’s not rocket science but it is science,” said Purnima Menon, a researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute. And no one is explaining it to women such as Ms. Adivasi. In any case, Dr. Menon added, “Giving information to a young woman alone is PHOTO: ZACKARY CANEPARI not useful if she has such low status that India’s central government has helpfully she can’t make the decision.” Yet when Mr. put up billboards at the entrance to many of Arora, the government nutrition chief, talks these villages, extolling the virtue of colos- about the need for a massive national ad trum in lines of Hindi script that, of course, campaign about correct infant and child almost no one here can read. feeding, he talks always about educating In many places, a father or his mother will “mothers,” not their husbands or in-laws. consult an astrologer for an auspicious day This may be the single greatest cause of to start breastfeeding - which could be as India’s vicious malnutrition problem: the many as 30 days after the child’s birth. After striking lack of autonomy of women, espe- that, in some families, the babies who sur- cially young women and those in rural ar- vive those first crucial weeks are breastfed eas. Today, the Adivasis’ grain box is empty

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- Ms. Adivasi thumps it, scowling at the hol- Indian girls is 61 per cent higher than it is for low sound. But when there is grain enough boys. for her to make five chapati flatbreads, her Nothing, notes Dr. Menon, is more core to husband eats two, the six children share the function of a family and a society than two and Ms. Adivasi gets one. the way in which it divides responsibility When Ms. Bai, the community-health for caring for its children. This is why a state worker, hears this, she reminds Mr. Adivasi such as Madhya Pradesh, compared with that his wife is breastfeeding and needs ex- African countries that have similar popula- tra calories. “She gave me two,” he says with tions, ranks so badly on malnutrition: Wom- a shrug. “I didn’t ask what she ate.” en may in general be oppressed in Ethiopia He goes on to describe how he struggles and Congo as well, but they have autonomy on the 250 rupees (roughly $4.50) that he, over feeding their children. his wife and the older children earn each “On purchasing food, on feeding herself, month to buy food and pay the fees for the on health care - the critical question is how one son who goes to school. (They do day does the gender inequality play out,” says labour for a national program targeting the Dr. Menon. “Women in Africa can be out in very poor.) society at the market, or generating income, But after Ms. Bai pulls her sari down over buying food for her family. In India women her eyes and adds a loudly muttered ob- often cannot make those decisions. So here servation, Mr. Adivasi acknowledges with we need to target men as well for purchas- a shrug that he spends more than half that ing behaviour: Women often don’t see the monthly income - 150 rupees - on bidi, tradi- market, so there’s no point telling them tional cigarettes. The revelation startles an what to feed. outsider, but no one in Dehde seems to find “And you have to work with older women it surprising. too if you want to change breastfeeding - be- In villages like this one, male children are cause the poor young mother is in no place prioritized from the moment of their con- to argue with her husband or her mother- ception. “There’s a reason why you see so in-law.” many more boys than girls in the nutrition So entrenched are these patterns - and so centres,” says Anne Philpott, an adviser on normal are listless toddlers such as Devs- nutrition to the British international de- ingh - that nobody here feels they need to velopment office in India. From ages 1 to 4, react in alarm, says Dr. Vandana Agrawal, according to Unicef, the mortality rate for nutritional specialist for Unicef in Mad-

30 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india hya Pradesh. “A mother sees that her child cially forbids such discrimination) from any is weak but she sees that all the children of the limited private labour opportunities around her are similar so she doesn’t per- around their village. ceive a problem and so she doesn’t try to There is a flip side to this situation: Caste address it,” she says. organizes Indian society into units down to “She’s working in the fields or doing daily the smallest community level. Along with wage labour, she gets up and takes care of the country’s long history of mass public the whole family, she prepares food and action, that should make it easy to do effec- leaves the child with an elder sibling of tive public education on behaviour such as eight to 10 years old, and nobody takes care breastfeeding. of that child in a systematic way.” “If the astrologer is telling women not to Indeed when Ms. Bai tries once again to breastfeed until 30 days, then get out there talk to Prashadi Adivasi about how under- and educate the astrologers. Make them weight Devsingh is, he insists there is noth- your change agents,” says Ms. Philpott, the ing wrong and simply gets up and walks off British nutrition adviser. while she is speaking. With this kind of concerted effort, a great deal can be done quickly: Thailand cut its Caste-aways rate of child undernutrition in half in four years in the 1980s; China cut its by more Over top of this toxic brew of poverty and than half from 1990 to 2002. Vietnam and sexism is a uniquely Indian complicating Brazil have had similar successes. In Malawi factor, the enduring hold of the caste sys- in southern Africa - where the economy has tem. Regional child-health workers, and not grown at all and the AIDS epidemic has even rural outreach workers such as Ms. Bai, dramatically worsened public health - the are usually political appointees (the pa- government has nevertheless succeeded tronage system extends down to the lowest in cutting the proportion of malnourished level) and often of a higher caste than the children from 30 to 19 per cent in the past people they serve. As a result, the lowest- decade. caste women are often hesitant to use those These countries each followed a different services. approach, but what they had in common In addition, the Adivasi people are con- were strong government leadership and a sidered to be of such low caste that they are combined emphasis on public education, barred by custom (not by law, which offi- primary health-care delivery and interven-

31 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india tions with very poor households. China the wage-labour program that employs the made an aggressive push to get clean water Adivasi family for a few days each month. and sanitation to the poor; Thailand put 20 These are widely considered one of the great per cent of the national budget into health victories of the powerful leftist political care. movement here. India has one major program to tackle Through nearly a decade of litigation, undernutrition, called the Integrated Child the movement has persuaded the Supreme Development Service. The $1.6-billion initia- Court to order the Indian government to tive began in the 1970s and set up a network take steps such as serving midday meals at of kitchens and feeding centres in rural and all public primary schools and providing urban low-income areas across the country. grain at highly subsidized prices to millions While it has been praised for its ambition, of destitute households (although far from it is cumbersome and badly managed - “a all). “You cannot overstate the importance shambles,” in the off-the-record assessment of these steps,” says Delhi-based activist of one government consultant involved in Kiran Bhatty. designing it. Corrupt officials skim the cash, Yet the very success of this coalition or poorly-trained bureaucrats mismanage means that the focus of discussion has been the distributions. on feeding schoolchildren - a debate over “There is no strong monitoring, and there whether to provide them with enriched is no accountability of district officials - no biscuits or a precooked meal dominated the sense that ‘I have to serve,’ “ says Unicef’s discussion in the national parliament all last homegrown expert Dr. Agrawal, who has year. But the most crucial part of the malnu- watched schemes come and go for years as trition crisis in India has to do with babies, statistics stay stubbornly unchanged. “I get long before their school-aged years. “By the so frustrated with India,” she adds. time we’re talking about ‘food’,” says Anne Paradoxically, some of the greatest ob- Philpott, “it’s too late.” stacles are unintended consequences of the Invoking Gandhi work of lobby groups whose members are In recent years in Africa, great nutritional deeply concerned for the poor. India has a gains have been made by providing mi- powerful “right to food” lobby, a coalition of cronutrient supplements. Giving children charities and civil-rights groups that fought Vitamin A at the age of six months, at the long and hard to extend the Child Develop- cost of a nickel each, can cut child deaths by ment Service to cover all children and for 25 per cent. But such efforts were derailed

32 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india in India when a Hindu fundamentalist lobby self-proclaimed disciples use his words (and protested that the capsules were coated in little has more power here than invoking gelatin, a product made of cows, which are “Gandhiji”) to oppose food fortification by sacred in Hinduism. (Today, some areas are saying that whatever is produced in a village having success with liquid Vitamin A drops.) should be sufficient. Fortifying widely consumed foods with “There’s a perception that surely all of this nutrients such as iron has also been crucial can be done through food - through natu- in Africa, and it is desperately needed here, ral means, the Gandhian approach - and where most people are vegetarian. A stun- that the newer approaches are somehow ning 75 per cent of preschool-aged Indians artificial,” said Luc Laviolette, Asia program are acutely anemic, according to a national director for the Micronutrient Initiative, a family-health survey. But the anti-corporate Canadian program that has worked with left here is highly suspicious. “The anti-busi- the Indian government to boost Vitamin A ness lobby puts an emphasis on products supplementation here with some marked that are locally made and feels that fortifica- successes. “The reality is that for all these tion could just be a money-making scheme,” reasons - gender, land, plus economic rea- said Dr. Menon. sons - staple foods alone are not enough.” For example, breastfeeding advocates fear Ms. Bhatty says the right-to-food lobby is that any discussion about fortifying foods for not trying to turn back the clock: “It’s not infants will open the door to formula com- about a Gandhian utopia at all,” she says. panies, even though fortification can now be “There are many good reasons to go local, done in the home or a feeding centre, im- starting with the fact that you need local proving an infant’s diet without compromis- buy-in if a scheme is going to be sustainable. ing breastfeeding. Using local foods revives local practices, it Opponents of fortification also frequently boosts the local economy and it has environ- invoke the name of India’s great indepen- mental advantages.” dence fighter, Mahatma Gandhi. In his time, Underlying these political tussles are sys- he preached the sanctity of the village and temic failures of the Indian government - it said that Indians should sustain themselves has failed to prioritize public health, spend- on what they grew and produced at that ing just two per cent of the national budget level. on health care, compared to 13 per cent on That argument was aimed at trying to defence. There is ample research showing lessen British colonial power, but today his that cheap, relatively simple interventions

33 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india can have a huge impact, yet none of these on the mud-house walls and burn for fuel. are as politically popular as food aid and And nothing so far - no economic boom, no none are happening at a large enough scale space program, no superpower status - has to bring real change. changed the basic truths for the Adivasi And while even slum dwellers have family. doubled or tripled their incomes in India’s “We don’t have for ourselves so we don’t economic boom, that is rarely enough to feed the child - we are poor so we don’t have get them out of the slums into a house with these things to feed him,” Mr. Adivasi says, sanitation and clean water, so their children with equal parts resignation and defiance. continue to fall prey to monthly bouts of And after he has left the smoky dim of diarrhea and other illnesses. the family’s one-room house, when Ms. Bai leans close and tries to urge Ms. Adivasi The more things change ... to do something for tiny, frail Devsingh, the young mother rocks squats back on There are some stirrings of hope. A few her heels. “What can I do?” she asks softly. weeks ago, for example, the government in- “What is there for me to do?” troduced its first new guidelines on feeding children since 1975. Last October, the budget per day per child for food supplements was doubled from half a penny to one cent. The prime minister has appointed a com- mission on nutrition and promised funds, which Ms. Philpott finds heartening. “The fact that economic growth is so good and they are translating that into programs is a good sign.” The nutrition program’s head, Mr. Arora, predicts cheerfully that this could all start to show results in five to 10 years. Yet in Dehde, it all feels so far away as to be nonsensical. There is electricity for only an hour each night; girls in stained cotton saris collect water at the hand pump; wom- en pat cakes of cow dung into circles to dry

34 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

PHOTO: STALIN RAMESH

India’s troubling miracle

New HIV infections in much of India have dropped by half since 2000, a globally unmatched achievement. But some of the reasons why make it a less appealing example The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

not one of them. CHENNAI, INDIA – When government health And then five years ago, a different kind workers gave Thenmozhi and her friends of health worker dropped by her two-room condoms, they would blow them up and bat flat - a woman Thenmozhi knew, who made them back and forth in the streets of their about $50 a month selling sex like she did. slum in Chennai, giggling. It didn’t really She sat on the cement floor, helped Then- occur to her that she ought to use the con- mozhi pick through some rice and told her doms with her clients, the neighbourhood there was AIDS in India - in fact, right there men who paid her for sex, to protect herself in their crowded fishermen’s slum in the from AIDS. capital of the southern Tamil Nadu prov- That was a disease of other people, other ince. It had recently killed a man they both countries. Thenmozhi (who like many in knew. her community uses only one name) had She invited Thenmozhi to a community many problems - a drinking, philandering centre, where she heard informal lectures husband who once set her on fire when he about the virus and how sex workers must got angry, and feeding her children with no band together to insist clients use protec- job and a Grade 3 education - but AIDS was tion. When she left, her handbag was full

PHOTO: STALIN RAMESH

36 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india of condoms and the results of her free HIV posted similar declines. test: negative. What has happened here is starting to Thenmozhi went on to do a most remark- draw global attention. Yet so much of this able thing: “After that, I always used a con- story is unique to India, with its strengths dom. With every man who paid.” And when (such as pro-active governments) and its she passed the age of 40 last year and tran- weaknesses (particularly the rigid control sitioned into the role of madam - renting kept over its female citizens) that it’s ques- her bedroom to younger women and their tionable how much its example can be ap- clients - she handed each of them a con- plied anywhere else. dom, too. When India announced in 2007 that it had Although her actions may seem logical 2.3 million people living with HIV, rather and obvious, AIDS-education programs than the 5.7 million reported the year be- around the world have found that people fore, the government first attributed much rarely do the logical, obvious thing and use of the change to better data collection. Many condoms once they learn about the risk of in the AIDS field were skeptical. HIV. They may use condoms sometimes, “We and all the other AIDS organizations in some cases. They almost never use them think the number of people accessing ser- with the zealousness of Thenmozhi. vices is increasing, so why are the infection And yet she is no aberration. She is sim- numbers so low?” says Anjali Gopalan, head ply one example of the way the country has of the Delhi-based Naz Foundation and one cut its rate of AIDS infection in half in the of India’s most prominent AIDS activists. last decade, moved away from the brink of Northern states have weak mechanisms catastrophe and quietly achieved a great but for reporting AIDS cases, while marginal- unheralded public-health victory. ized populations such as the transgender In southern India, HIV incidence (the rate sex workers and drug users she works with of new infections) was 2 per cent per year in are never part of door-to-door surveys, she 2000; by 2007 it was just below 1 per cent. says, so tens of thousands of cases may be In the north, where HIV is far less preva- missing from the official statistics. And in all lent, there was no large decline, but also no regions, many people are still going without increase. adequate treatment. Only much-smaller Thailand, which im- Nevertheless, more and more research plemented a mandatory-condom campaign points to a substantial change in sexual be- in its sex industry in the 1990s, has ever haviour and with it a decline in the spread

37 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india of HIV. Syphilis infections, which closely wanted his assessment of India’s situation. mirror HIV, have had an almost-identical “Frank looked around, and he said, ‘This drop. looks just like Nairobi in 1984,’ “ Prof. Jha “The decline is real. The numbers have recalls. Those words made him shudder: plausibility and credibility,” says Prabhat He was well aware of the horrifying swath Jha, an epidemiologist who directs the Cen- of destruction AIDS went on to cut through tre for Global Health Research in Toronto, the slums of Kenya and so many other Afri- and was an architect of India’s early AIDS- can nations. control program. “There has been a pro- But the parallel was obvious: In India in found change in behaviour among clients 1997, HIV infection was exploding among and sex workers that accounts for most of sex workers, drug users and truck drivers in the drop.” congested urban areas. But almost no one While India has a significant population of knew about the disease and no one was do- intravenous drug users - as many as half of ing anything to protect themselves or their whom, in some areas, have HIV-AIDS - the other partners. bulk of the HIV transmission in this country In a country of this size, with a frail public happens through heterosexual sex. Men, health system, it was an unfolding disaster. often married, pay professionals for sex, The newly-formed National AIDS Control get infected and then pass the virus to their Organization said the country’s infection wives or regular partners, who infect chil- rate was the fastest-growing in the world. dren at birth. Prof. Jah ran mathematical models that In 1997, Prof. Jha - who is Indian-born predicted more than 20 million Indians with but grew up in Winnipeg - found himself in HIV by 2010. Kamithipura, the teeming red light district But it didn’t happen. The aversion of this of Mumbai. He had just been hired by the crisis has many who work in AIDS control World Bank to design a national AIDS inter- feeling justifiably proud - theirs is a signifi- vention for India, and with him was another cant achievement in a field notable for its Manitoban, Frank Plummer. rare victories. Billions of dollars and 15 years Now the director of the national Cen- of effort in the worst-affected nations in tre for Infectious Disease Prevention and Africa have yielded declines in HIV infection Control in Ottawa, Dr. Plummer was then of at best 5 or 6 per cent (except possibly in a microbiologist renowned for his work in Uganda, which saw a very sharp drop in the the early days of HIV in East Africa. Prof. Jha late 1980s - the reasons are hotly debated

38 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india today). “We still had a window of opportunity,” Ask those involved, such as Prof. Jha - who recalls S. Ramasundaram. had a $200-million budget from the World Today he heads the department of public Bank to try to stop infections - what worked, works in Tamil Nadu’s state government, and they list mass distribution of free con- but back then, he was a director in the doms; the use of “peer educators” such as health department, and was handed the the sex worker who visited Thenmozhi; and new AIDS file. a media campaign full of frank messages. He had a background in demography - All of which have been tried, and tried, and looking at Prof. Jha’s models of project- and tried in Africa, with only meagre im- ed spread of HIV, he had a similar full-body pact. So why did they work in India? shudder of horror. Windows of opportunity “I argued with the government. Very rare- The first difference is timing. HIV was ly in development do you get a crystal ball. I spreading quickly in Africa by the mid- said, ‘If you don’t do something, it’s going to 1960s, yet it was 20 years before anyone be doomsday.’ “ tested an African for it. Mr. Ramasundaram was talking - urgently By the time real efforts to stop the virus and often - to state leaders, and that is the got under way, hundreds of thousands of next key difference from Africa. Tamil Nadu people had already died and in many coun- is the state that has posted the greatest tries 10 to 15 per cent of the general popula- gains on HIV and its government has been tion was infected. active and engaged since the day those first The first HIV cases in India, on the other cases were reported - in sharp contrast to hand, were not found until 1986, here in the denial with which many African leaders Chennai, when two men tested positive. For first confronted HIV. the next few years, there were only a hand- (The huge sizes of Indian states - Tamil ful of cases. Nadu’s population is 64 million, larger than By the time some far-sighted bureaucrats three-quarters of African countries - and the got on the job in the mid-1990s, HIV was differences between them make comparing just at the 1-per-cent rate which epidemiolo- Indian states and African nations more ac- gists consider its viral tipping point - and, curate than using India as a whole.) most critically, not yet in the general popu- Mr. Ramasundaram launched an AIDS- lation but still largely confined to high-risk control organization at arm’s length from groups. the government, to minimize bureaucratic

39 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india slowdowns and corruption. governmental Tamil Nadu AIDS Initiative. He brought in the best private advertising “But when you are doing all these things agencies in the state, gave them a budget together, they are going to listen to what you bigger than Coke or Pepsi (then the biggest are saying about HIV.” spenders) and had them vet all their ads “My body is a temple and I have to take with people living with HIV. care of it - the director has told us we are Then he blanketed the state: billboards, precious people and God’s spirit lives in us,” cricket stadiums, movies and newspapers in says Thenmozhi, speaking with the kind of every language. reverence that many sex workers seem to “There were so many messages on HIV have for Ms. Bai. So, she added, condoms then - the Chief Minister called me and said, only make sense. ‘You’re frightening people.’ I said, ‘Sir, that’s the point.’ He said, ‘It looks like we have a High-risk focus big epidemic!’ I said, ‘No, we want to prevent a big epidemic.’ “ The Tamil Nadu program benefited from bit- Next he turned to community groups that ter experience in Africa, where the thinking were already working in slums and with sex had been that for each dollar of AIDS pre- workers, and tasked them with going door- vention funding, 20 cents should be spent to-door to spread the word. on the high-risk groups and the rest on the The leader was Lakshmi Bai, a fast-talking, general population. whirling-sari-clad social scientist with years By the late 1990s, Mr. Ramasundaram ex- of experience with sex workers, including plained, research had made clear that there not only women but gay and transgender would be far more impact from spending men. the whole dollar on those high-risk groups She eschewed the idea of a straight-up - and keeping the virus out of the general AIDS program; instead, she involved the population. Condom use by sex workers sex workers in projects to build their self-es- rose from 40 per cent to 90 per cent in three teem, organized them into collectives with years. food and clothing banks, and pushed them Meanwhile, the billboards and movie ads to confront government with their needs. were addressing a particular population: “You don’t think only about just one “Don’t treat Tamil Nadu as an African coun- disease. You can’t talk just about AIDS,” try ... the literacy level is higher, the adapta- explains Ms. Bai, who now runs the non- tion to change is faster and the technology

40 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india absorption is higher,” Dr. S. Vijayakumar, But there are also less-pleasant truths now head of the state AIDS agency, says about India’s victory over HIV. Beyond lit- (with a certain smugness that often charac- eracy, terizes the reflections of those in the field condoms, blunt ads and brilliant bureau- here). crats, one thing more than any other has However, in terms of one key bit of tech- checked the spread of the virus here: the nology, there was indeed a crucial difference oppression of Indian women. in India: Condoms had been actively pro- The extreme control exerted over wom- moted here since Indira Gandhi’s popula- en’s personal lives - first by their parents, tion-control policies of the 1970s. then by their husbands and in-laws - means Also, there was little of the cultural dis- that very few ever have the opportunity to taste and discomfort that has greeted con- have a sexual partner other than their hus- dom campaigns in Africa - and no conserva- bands. tive Christian church to lead a public outcry Where 25 per cent of men report more about abstinence. than one sexual partner, less than 2 per cent There were, however, plenty of trained lab of women do. Married women get infected technicians and statisticians and the sort of by their husbands, and sometimes pass HIV qualified staff an AIDS program needs, the to their children, but the virus stops there: human resources that are so often lacking in They do not have other partners to pass HIV Africa. on to. And there was cash. When Mr. Ramasun- This is a marked contrast to Africa, where daram set up his new state AIDS organiza- it is now clear that the “concurrent sexual tion, the World Bank offered up millions network” - the tendency for both men and of dollars, which meant he didn’t have to women to have overlapping partners rather compete for scarce state-health resources. than serial ones - has been the key driver of “It was crucial that we had that source of the epidemic. funding,” he says. (Meanwhile, discrimination has played a International agencies rushed to support sharply different role in the spread of HIV India’s AIDS response in its infancy; the among men who have sex with men - it has Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone extremely limited AIDS organizations’ abili- pledged $342-million (U.S.) over 10 years ty effectively to provide these men condoms from 2004, its largest program anywhere. and information. As a consequence, they Darker side have HIV infection rates 10 times those of

41 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india the general population.) He has a three-pronged strategy based There is, in fact, a broader issue of culture on continued prevention messages, better at play in India’s AIDS success story, the reach of the interventions that prevent par- sort of squishy subject that makes AIDS re- ents from infecting children, and continued searchers flinch because it lies so far outside work with the high-risk groups. tidy quantifiable data. “We should be able to do this,” he says, But many in the field agree that Indian working long past dark in an office where a society remains rigidly hierarchical, still steady flow of assistants ebbed in and out infused with the powerful role of the caste bearing yet more charts and data sets. system, and people are accustomed to the “I have a plan in place - my problem is my strong role of government in their lives. high-risk groups. If I can bring them into the That’s a contrast to many African coun- health fold we’ll certainly be able to do it.” tries with weaker states and more egalitar- But Mr. Vijayakumar is watching his bud- ian societies. And it meant that when the get shrink, and government, donor and pub- Indian government sternly told people to lic attention shift away from HIV, as success use condoms and cut back on partners, they itself eases the sense of panic. listened. Many say the shift in government funds is justified, given how few people HIV kills in Zero patient comparison with basic public-health prob- lems such as water-borne diarrhea, child Mr. Vijayakumar believes that in the next malnutrition, smoking or road accidents. couple of years, his AIDS control agency The Gates Foundation is redirecting its fund- can drive new infections down to zero. It’s a ing to issues such as maternal and newborn breathtakingly ambitious goal - it has never care. been done anywhere else - but he brandish- Yet HIV remains of critical concern here: es an impressive array of maps, charts and With 2.3-million infected people, this coun- software programs to demonstrate just how try has the third-largest burden of HIV-AIDS he is going to do it. in the world, and has succeeded in getting His office collects data from every pos- treatment to fewer than half of the people sible source - from blood banks to maternity who need it. hospitals to neighbourhood clinics for sex The successes achieved have been mostly workers - and can pinpoint where each new in the richer south of the country. The out- infection comes from. standing question is the north, with much

42 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india weaker governments and health systems eral hundred thousand Indians have already that have yet to embark on serious AIDS- died of the disease, Prof. Jha estimates. control programs. “Everything is not rosy here,” says Ms. Bai. Other factors make the north vulnerable “There is so much to do! I’m quite worried too. “There are large numbers of migrant about sustainability, with the funders leav- workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and ing. Even now, with all this ‘empowerment’ they are a huge worry,” says Mr. Ramasunda- blah-blah, sexual decisions are taken by ram. A major factor in the African pandemic men.” has been workers spending months or years There are 50,000 Tamil Nadu sex work- away from their wives and paying for sex in ers on her books today, but new young girls their host cities. - and young men - show up all the time. “If Overall, the precise situation with HIV in you’re not going to continuously address, the north is unknown - mother-child trans- what will happen? If these things are not mission could be exploding. done - disaster only.” India’s AIDS interventions have been rela- But when Thenmozhi sits in a circle with tively cheap - a tenth the cost of Thailand’s the women at the drop-in centre, when they sex-worker and condom intervention - but joke and gently mock their clients, the mar- they are not free. “The era of ‘Big HIV’ in ried men “who say they can’t eat the same India may be over, and we know that once food every day,” disaster seems far away. The condoms become common in commercial women bemoan their troubles - shirking sex, they stay common,” says Prof. Jha. “But husbands and mounting bills. But AIDS is there is a huge ‘if’ - the Indian government not one of them. has to continue to pay for the cheap and ef- fective ways to curb HIV for at least the next decade, especially in North India.” In Chennai, Lakshmi Bai, who has lived through a rare, radical shift in sexual behav- iour, is as often gloomy as she is encouraged. “So much life has been lost,” she says - a fact often glossed over by the bureaucrats and researchers excited about the falling infec- tion rates. While many HIV-related deaths are not reported as AIDS, at minimum sev-

43 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

PHOTO: LANA SLEZIC

What’s better than a miracle school for ‘untouchable’ girls? Two schools, for a start

Stephanie Nolen revisits a woman who’s changed the lives of India’s most marginalized children, and finds she’s doubled her efforts The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

BIHAR, INDIA – When mealtime arrives the community are hungry. And we do not first night, the new cook hauls the steel pots want to waste. So please, take only what you out of the kitchen. Big enough for adults to need.” bathe in, the pots brim with rice, lentil daal Come morning, the girls line up again for and fragrant masala vegetables. breakfast. This time, they fill their plates Ninety schoolgirls line up and hold out just so far, no further. One of the smallest their hands for the steel thali tray that will girls approaches Sister Sudha, wraps a thin be their plate from now on. The cook holds arm around her waist. “People in my village out the ladle to the first in line to serve her- are hungry,” she says earnestly. “We can’t self, but the girl is frozen in confusion. All waste.” down the row, eyes are wide, disbelieving. Here you will always have what you need: It is more food than most of them have The words, when the slight nun speaks seen in their lives. them into the fading light of her new These girls - who have always eaten last, schoolroom, are deceptively simple. But left with only the scraps at the edge of the they are the bedrock of Sister Sudha’s edu- pot - are being told to help themselves. To cational philosophy, of the revolution she fill their plates. is trying to engender in one of the world’s And they do. They eat and eat, giggling most marginalized communities. through mouths stuffed full. When at last Nearly 50 years ago, Sister Sudha, then a they sit back on their heels, unable to swal- teenager, came to the eastern state of Bihar low one more grain of rice, their plates are from her native Kerala to join a Catholic still covered in food. religious order and work with India’s poor- Now, Sister Sudha Varghese steps forward est people. and calls gently for their attention. She soon fled the comfortable confines of “You have eaten very well,” she says ap- the convent and spent the next 25 years in provingly in Hindi. There are giggles. Sister a tola, a huddle of mean mud houses at the Sudha goes on, her words slow and mea- edge of a village that are reserved for the sured: “There will always be enough for you Mushahar, a group at the very bottom of the here. You will have three meals every day, Hindu caste system. and you will have two snacks, and there will These are the so-called untouchables, or always be as much as you need. Dalits, deemed by virtue of their birth too “But food is precious,” she tells the girls, impure to eat, walk, bathe or even breathe all of them silent now. “And many in our among their neighbours.

45 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

Eventually, Sister Sudha was driven out began to feel the limits of Prerna - just 125 of the village by her own success: When girls, when everywhere she went in the state Mushahar she had educated on their rights there were so many more, glinting with the demanded police action over their abuse, same potential but left herding buffalo, the dominant caste members came looking collecting firewood and walking with their for her. She moved nearer to the capital of heads down. She was bothered, too, by sug- Bihar, Patna. gestions that Prerna’s success was an aber- She was determined to try an experiment ration. she had been thinking about for years: She Meanwhile Bihar state came to be headed would build a safe and nurturing place for by a canny Premier, Nitish Kumar, who has Mushahar girls. identified the Mushahar and other low-caste She would take them away from the stren- groups as both a vote bank and an obstacle uous farm work and domestic labour they to his progress statistics. He sent word ask- perform from the time they are toddlers, ing Sudha if she could replicate Prerna. She and away from the omnipresent risk of said she would try. He promised the money sexual assault and certain marriage in their to rent and convert a building, hire teachers early teens. She would educate them, in the and buy books, beds and pots. school curriculum and in something more: For a location, she chose the congested She would try to dislodge their deep sense town of Gaya, about five hours from Patna. of inferiority and teach them the rights they It is a few kilometres from Bhodgaya, the are promised in India’s constitution - and place where the Buddha found enlighten- how to fight for them. ment, which has an airport and a stream Sister Sudha called her residential school of pilgrims and tourists from Thailand, Sri Prerna, the Hindi word for inspiration. In Lanka, Tibet and beyond. Gaya, by contrast, the past six years, its students have flour- has nothing of note except the high rate ished beyond everyone’s wildest expecta- of starvation deaths in its large Mushahar tions, except for her own. She imagined just community. But it does have the demand: what has happened: The girls would win Mushahar parents “are beginning to realize international karate tournaments, fine-art what they have been missing,” Sister Sudha competitions and school prizes; they would says. bloom with poise, confidence and a quietly nourished defiance. Yet even as they flourished, Sister Sudha (cont.)

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Parents flock to the new school on the first day to read the entrance list and see if their daughters have made it in PHOTO: LANA SLEZIC

Crowding through the doors as few have any, but ability and eagerness to learn. She posted the list of successful can- The new school, called Prerna 2, has space didates and announced the school would for 100 girls on three floors of a single nar- open, ready or not, in February. row building. It took the best part of a year The first day, families began to arrive mid- to get it open, navigating state bureaucracy morning. The girls were in their best clothes, and fending off predatory civil servants and with their meagre possessions in little satch- resentful neighbours. There were delays els, and giggly with anticipation, clinging to when builders did not show up, funds were the small siblings they would be leaving for not sent and deliveries did not come. the first time. They lined up to register even Meanwhile, Sister Sudha sent word to all as workers trudged past with piles of bricks the Mushahar tola within 100 kilometres, on their heads and a sociable cow belonging saying each family could send a girl to take to the previous tenant poked her head in the an entrance test - to measure not education, window.

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There was one arrival the school’s founder The parents nodded earnestly. Most had was not expecting, a young woman with signed the enrolment form with a thumb- her three-year-old daughter. Sister Sudha print. explained the school was for older girls. The But she continued with a warning. “One mother said she knew: She wanted to enroll thing I want to tell you right from the begin- herself. She’d been forced by her parents ning: Your girls might look small today, but to leave school and marry at 12. Now, her the school environment, regular meals and husband was dead. She was still a teenager. sports - all of these things will make them Couldn’t they find her a place? grow faster. In five or six years, they will Sister Sudha directed someone to write start looking big. But then don’t start think- down the woman’s name and address. She ing, ‘They have grown up, and we have to could not take her here at Prerna 2, but she get them married.’ “ would look for a place for her. When girls are married, they have to leave Next through the door was Leela Devi, the school. “So you yourself,” Sister Sudha 29, with her daughters Anjali and Shushan, went on, “would be taking your daughter off who were 12 and 11. Ms. Devi explained that of the path of education and harming your- she had left school in Grade 2 - “I can read selves. All our previous students who chose and write my name and my husband’s name to leave school and get married, they regret and my kids’ names.” But as for her daugh- it now.” ters, “if they study here, they can be teach- In the late afternoon, the parents made ers, or doctors.” their ways out the door. There were no big She watched the bustle of opening day displays of emotion, just some brisk ad- with satisfaction, although her daughters monishments to study hard; any girls who looked bewildered at her words. were overwhelmed brushed their tears back At midday, Sister Sudha gathered all the quickly. Sister Sudha told the teachers to parents together in the big main room. “It’s start leading them in games and songs to a very important day for you and for us, it’s keep them distracted. a day of joy,” she began. “Because your girls Ambitions yet unglimpsed are taking a new step in their lives. ... Our The new girls were not yet like those of communities, whether in Gaya or in Patna the first school. They were skinny, grimy or anywhere else, lag behind in education, and scratching at lice, with attention spans, and those who lack education have hardly she figured, of eight minutes at best. And any scope to grow.” something more: “If I ask the girls in Prerna

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1, ‘Who would you like to become?’ they the sheltered courtyard. The girls squinted would say, ‘I want to become a teacher. I uncertainly at Ms. Kumari, but she moved want to be a doctor, an engineer, I want briskly, filling a bucket, tugging off dresses to be the district magistrate.’ All kinds of and handing out shampoo. Shivering in the things come out. But when you ask these morning chill, the girls were lined up and girls, they have no idea.” scrubbed - for many, it was their first bath in months; from now on, they would do it each morning. Ms. Kumari gave out lengths of sarong to use as towels, and made sure everyone had a comb. Next came an intense session of hair brushing and braiding, as the mats and knots of months were worked out. In an hour, the girls were lined up again, looking noticeably tidier. Out in the yard, the new sports teacher PHOTO: LANA SLEZIC began to teach basic calisthenics, with some No one has ever suggested to these girls flailing and bumping along the way. The they can be anything but landless farm girls learned a prayer, and then a song - ask- labourers like their parents. “That kind of ing a non-specific god to give them strength ambition is not there yet, or they are not (Sister Sudha intended to keep this school able to express it. But then, I have my ideas - as non-sectarian as the first Prerna). that it is there.” The girls were preparing to file in to break- The next morning brought a series of fast when the nun, who had watched qui- firsts: The girls were woken before it was etly from a back corner, stepped forward. light and shown how to roll up their bed- There was one more thing they would do ding and sweep the floor. The housemother, each morning, she said: “You must say, ‘Jai Jyoti Kumari, doled out toothbrushes and Bhim!’ “ toothpaste, led the girls to the row of taps The girls looked blankly at her. out back and instructed everyone to wash “We say, ‘Long live Babasaheb Bhimrao their faces and brush their teeth. Ambedkar,’ “ she told them. The girls clearly Then they were taken in small groups knew little or nothing about the legendary around to the hand pump out front, in Dalit leader, architect of India’s constitution,

49 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india whom Dalits revere with the devotion that straight. No one had ever spoken to them dominant-caste Hindus have for Mahatma like this. Gandhi. “He was a leader of the Dalits, and “Demand your rights, and if you have to, the laws of our nation were written by him. fight for them. If we fight together, we can He was from a Dalit community, a Dalit fam- do anything.” ily, a family like ours. Once more she punched up her fist, and “He got the opportunity to study, and this time every girl yelled, “Jai Bhim!” And not just in India. He was so bright, he went then she sent them in to breakfast. abroad to America and England, and prac- ‘Maybe I am very greedy’ tised law. Do you know lawyers, the ones It is with full plates, quick hugs and who wear black coats and fight cases in simple, radical lessons like these that Sis- courts? Our Babasaheb Ambedkar went to ter Sudha will change these girls’ lives, as study in England and then came back to In- she has at Prerna 1. But she can’t be at both dia. He wrote the first laws of our nation. So schools at once, and if she starts more - as he is the biggest leader for our people.” the state government is urging - she will Her charges were still staring. have ever less time to spend at each one. “So every day after prayer what will we She realizes the risk. say? We’ll say for him, ‘Jai Bhim!’” “Maybe I am very greedy about them,” The girls repeated the words, but too soft- she said of her girls. “Because I see what can ly, Sister Sudha scolded. She wasn’t finished be done with them.” Every time she visited with the history lesson. “Ambedkar also another village, she saw what she might do faced a lot of discrimination but he fought with the girls there. “So maybe I have given against it. He made a place for himself, he into that temptation also.” She laughed. struggled, and he left us three mantras.” “But there is no harm in trying.” She waited, but the girls did not know the At least, she hopes not. The Prerna mantras. She looked to the new teachers - schools have answered every question they didn’t know either. about what these girls are capable of, except “Become educated!” Sister Sudha thun- the one that may prove most important: dered. “And? Unite! And? Struggle. ... Do you Where will they go after that? They no lon- know what it means to be united? To be- ger fit easily in with their families and their come one! Together to fight for our rights.” villages. But with caste-based atrocities By now her eyes were blazing and the reported in newspapers each day, it is clear girls’ chins were lifted and their shoulders that change in India at large has not hap-

50 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india pened as fast as at Prerna. “My dream and my hope for them is that they would be educated,” she said of her new charges. “They’ll be people with self- confidence, independent, and someone who can stand up in their community and attract other children to follow the way that they have taken, the way of education. And they will become agents of change and help their society to go ahead. “And I’m sure they themselves will begin to dream.”

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PHOTO: LANA SLEZIC Students at Prerna share what they hope to become The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

PHOTO: SIMON DE TREY-WHITE

Two is enough

India has won international acclaim for protecting women’s reproductive rights even as it reins in a booming population. Yet, in the countryside, where most poor people live and most babies are born, Stephanie Nolen finds quite a different story: government sanctions against couples who insist on having more than two children and effectively one form of birth control for those who fall in line – sterilization. The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

KAMRORA, INDIA – Noni Raja did just what she Even worse, her defiance would come was supposed to do. She married when she back to haunt her. was 20, in 2004, and gave birth to a son a India began grappling with the magni- year later. In 2006, she had a daughter. And tude of its population even before it became a year after that brought the second son independent in 1947; it was labelled a crisis she needed to fulfill her obligations in the in the 1970s when the government of Indira eyes of her in-laws, farmers with a tiny plot Gandhi carried out mandatory sterilizations, in this hardscrabble hamlet in the Indian en masse. heartland. But since those dark days, the country has Everyone was pleased with her. Ms. Raja emerged as a leader in the field, adopting proceeded to find a job as a government the language of “reproductive health and health-outreach worker, and enjoyed the rights.” esteem that came with the $15 or so she That means, in the words of the World brought the family each month. Health Organization, that India is commit- Then Noni Raja did something rather less ted to ensuring its people have “the capabil- expected. She got up one day, caught a bus ity to reproduce and the freedom to decide into Mahoba, the nearest town, and present- if, when and how often to do so” - and that ed herself at the hospital for a tubal ligation. their decision be “free of discrimination, She spent a couple of hours recovering, coercion and violence.” took the bus home and informed her star- This official position - which contrasts tled in-laws that she had had “the opera- starkly with China’s strict one-child policy tion.” - has won India international plaudits; last Years later, her mother-in-law is still af- year, it was invited to co-chair a prestigious fronted. “I didn’t like it,” Kiran Devi says as summit on family planning held in London, the two women sit in the spring sun on their and feted for its progressive approach. front stoop. “She went against our wishes.” Yet spend some time talking to women in At the time, Ms. Raja wanted the best for Kamrora - and dozens of villages like it in the children she already had, which meant the “Hindi belt,” the poor states that span ensuring there would be no more. India’s middle bulge and are home to about Being surgically sterilized seems an ex- 450 million people - and you learn some- treme form of contraception for such a thing that never came up at the meeting young woman, but India’s approach to fam- in Britain: The policy this country has on ily planning left her with no other choice. paper is markedly different than what hap-

57 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india pens in real life. in family planning, which she is charge of The reality is harsh and repressive and delivering in Kamrora, and is responsible targets the most marginalized, often the for distributing a government-funded sup- lowest-caste, women. It is also far from ef- ply of condoms and oral contraceptives. It is fective in areas with the highest birth rates, the only access to birth control people here paradoxically driving the rate up and mak- have, as most cannot afford a trip to the city. ing poverty worse in the process. Yet, in a situation typical of India’s badly Beijing has been widely criticized for managed social schemes, it has been two limiting families to only one child, but India years since Ms. Raja last received anything has adopted many aspects of its policy. With to dole out. Today, her kit contains one 1.2 billion people and on course to overtake desiccated packet of prophylactics and an China as the planet’s most populous coun- expired pregnancy test. try in about a decade, India is taking steps So, when a village woman confides that many consider nearly as harsh - but cloak- her in-laws have given her permission to ing them in the far more benign-sounding stop having babies, Ms. Raja knows that the “two-child norm.” only option is sterilization. To make sure And despite all the government rhetoric that she promotes it, the government pays about how its citizens have choices and con- her $3 for each woman she brings in - and, if doms are brought right to village doorsteps, she does not deliver as many as the govern- the truth is that, in the northern half of the ment expects, she stands to lose the only country, the Indian health service consis- wage-paying job in Kamrora, other than tently delivers only one form of contracep- breaking stones in the quarry. tion in the rural areas, where 70 per cent of Ms. Raja is the best-educated woman in the population lives. the village - she finished 10th grade before That is tubal ligation, often performed at her health-worker training - but she says “camps,” where dozens of women are steril- with a sigh that it’s sometimes hard to ized in a day; more than half of them are 25 explain the surgery to her neighbours. Re- or younger, and they are often illiterate and search from the Centre for Health and Social unclear about what the surgery means. Justice in Delhi shows that state govern- ‘It’s entirely coercive’ ments aggressively target women from the Unlike many women, Noni Raja knew poorest aboriginal and Dalit (once known as exactly what she was doing when she got “untouchable”) communities. on the bus to the city: She has been trained Those who undergo the operation may

58 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india not understand what is being done, but they policy has changed since Mrs. Gandhi’s era, know that there can be severe consequenc- when the rural poor were seen as strangling es if they do not comply with the two-child the country’s chances of progress, its mind- norm. set has not. There is a genuine commitment “We’re on the track to be just like China,” to ending poverty and a sincere desire to see says Leena Uppal, an earnest activist who families better able to care for their children. co-ordinates the National Coalition Against Yet officials based in air-conditioned offices Two-Child Norm and Coercive Population in the capital still believe that ignorant rural Policies. “It’s entirely coercive - for the wom- poor people are dragging the country down en, for the health worker, who will lose her by mindlessly having babies, and simply do job if she doesn’t bring in enough people. not know what is best. The whole focus is on closing off wombs, of “The construction of the population prob- making sure these women don’t have any lem is a middle-class creation,” Dr. Das says, more babies.” “and it has caste and class distinctions: The China’s one-child campaign, adopted in ‘wrong’ people are the ones who have eight 1979, forced women to have abortions if kids.” they conceived again without state approv- In this, India is not unlike the West, where al, or fined couples heavily, especially in there is public debate about the higher birth urban areas. India’s policy involves no such rate of “welfare moms,” aboriginal people direct punishments, but its impact can be and immigrants. The idea is entrenched, harsh in a place such as Kamrora. and it results in policy entirely disconnected Parents with more than two children are from the reality of life in a place such as denied access to everything from a subsidy Kamrora, where families have many good for babies delivered in hospital and school reasons for having more than two children. bursaries to the right to run for political First, mortality rates remain high - chil- office. A law now being considered would dren, as Ms. Raja will tell you starkly, die deny them access to subsidized food - a tac- here. Almost one in 10 do not live to see tic The Times of India, the country’s largest their fifth birthday. Subsistence agriculture newspaper, recently reported, favourably, remains the only employment option, so on its front page. the young are needed to work in the fields The problem, says Abhijit Das, an obstetri- and later, in the absence of any real social- cian who runs the Centre for Health and So- welfare net, to care for their parents in old cial Justice, is that, while the government’s age.

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And couples have children because there desire for sons, to carry on a family name is no way not to have them: Those unwill- and inherit land and assets, is so strong that ing to undergo sterilization - newlyweds, for families may abort girls to get the two boys example - have access to no other form of they want and stay within the limit. birth control. India already has one of the world’s more The two-child norm flies in the face of sharply skewed sex ratios. As in China, the idea of “reproductive rights,” Ms. Up- millions of women are “missing” from the pal notes. “What is a more basic right than normal population balance. And yet the deciding how many children to have - and mandarins in charge of its population policy when to have them?” reject any comparison with China. It also punishes women when the deci- “There is no grounds to call [Indian poli- sion is not really theirs to make. Ms. Raja’s cy] repressive,” says S.K. Sikdar, who heads family expected her to have a third child, the family-planning division at the national but when she did, she became ineligible for Ministry of Health in Delhi. “We learned our a central government allowance to provide lesson [in the 1970s]. ... This isn’t a popula- extra food while pregnant and breastfeeding tion issue any more; it’s a mother-and-child (a policy supposedly aimed at poor, Dalit health intervention.” women like her). As well, she lost the right Energetic and driven, Dr. Sikdar insists to run for the local council, and her daugh- that “we don’t have a two-child norm.” He ter was disqualified from a bursary program says that the only message to women from designed to boost girls’ education. government is about the benefit of having The policy is enforced by local-level of- children later and at least two years apart. ficials, often haphazardly. As part of her “Our only intervention is to give people health-worker job, Ms. Raja has succeeded free access to [child] spacing. ... I know our in obtaining the bursary for having a baby in women are quite happy with what they a maternity centre for a number of women have,” he says, adding that the government with more than two children, even though has had great success in delivering condoms it is theoretically denied. At the same time, and oral contraceptives directly to rural she says, other women in Kamrora have doorsteps - that kit of Ms. Raja should be been denied a state bonus for mothers who replenished every month. have daughters - a measure designed to dis- Many of the more punitive policies in courage sex-selective abortion, an especially place today have been set by state govern- grim side effect of the two-child policy. The ments, but the two-child norm also applies

60 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india to a number of benefits, such as nutritional more than cut in half, falling to 2.75 children support for pregnant women, that come per woman from 6.5. from the national government. Dr. Sikdar “If you want to emulate, emulate the posi- acknowledges this, but he says that “low- tive,” Mr. Nanda says. “We ought to focus on performing states” (the poorest ones with equity.” highest fertility) are exempt. In the 1990s, he oversaw the adoption That news has not reached Kamrora - or of a rights-based approach - only to see it dozens of other areas where poor women, quickly and quietly usurped by politicians often Dalit, are denied access to school who still believed that the key was to move meals, clean-water schemes, the female- fast and stop the “backward classes” from child bonus and the maternity-home pay- breeding. ment because they have more than two India’s population is rising, but because children. All state family-planning pro- of what demographers call “momentum grams are run on money from the central growth.” Sixty per cent of Indians are of government. reproducing age. Even if tomorrow India A.R. Nanda, who was once in charge of attained “replacement level” fertility - if population policy for India and established people had only enough children to replace its family planning department, says that themselves when they died - the country’s not only is there a two-child policy, it was overall population would keep growing be- explicitly borrowed from China: “The idea cause the number of people being born will of withholding benefits comes from China exceed those dying for several decades. ... ‘If China can do it.’” Despite alarms raised regularly in the After taking its hard line in 1979, China media, fertility rates are, in fact, falling, and saw its population growth fall sharply, and have been for two decades. In 21 Indian many in the Indian government were im- states and territories - including all of the pressed. But they failed to grasp the basics more prosperous south - average fertility is of population science, Mr. Nanda says: “The at or below replacement level of 2.1 children highest drop in Chinese population came per couple. The problem would take care of before the one-child policy; it came from itself, says Dr. Das of the Centre for Health equitable access to education, health care, and Social Justice, if people in the high- including family planning, and a rise in in- fertility areas had access to jobs, education come” following the communist revolution. and, in the short term, condoms, birth-con- From 1952 to 1979, China’s fertility rate was trol pills and intrauterine devices.

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Sterilization actually pushes population many as 35 a day; rates of failure and com- growth, he notes. “The largest amount of plications are much higher than the interna- reproduction now is young women having tional norm. their first and second children; sterilization Dr. Sikdar, as chief of national policy, says does nothing to change this. the camps are supposed to take place in “The message [from government] is, medical facilities, and organizers of those ‘Have your children quickly and terminate that don’t face criminal prosecution. But your reproduction.’ When you give that last year in Kaparfora in the state of Bihar, a message, you speed up the rate of delivery doctor sterilized 53 women lying on benches and you speed up momentum.” You wind in a school without electricity, and charges up with even more reproducing adults. have yet to be laid. Contest prizes include a car Research by Dr. Das’s centre consistently When India’s policy was overhauled after finds that it is women from the poorest Mrs. Gandhi, eliminating government-set communities, usually aboriginal people targets for contraception and sterilization and those at the bottom of the caste system, was seen as key to being less repressive. who are targeted when a region needs to But bureaucrats and health officials did reach its quota. They may have no idea that little more than change their terminology. the procedure is permanent, he says. “Targets and camps are back with a ven- Navin Kumar, the health information geance,” according to Mr. Nanda, saying he officer who supervises Kamrora, says the has seen officials who meet their targets state government gave him a target (for the handsomely rewarded by, for example, hav- 875,000 residents of Mahoba district) last ing a government car at their disposal. year of 4,100 women and 400 men. In 2011, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, the chief And yet, Dr. Sikdar insists: “We do not minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh, an- give targets - we have ... ‘estimated levels of nounced a drive to sterilize 750,000 people achievement’ ... It’s a management tool. A a year. Those who underwent the surgery or doctor has to make a plan based on num- brought in new recruits were entered to win bers.” prizes, including washing machines, DVD If local officials, such as Mr. Kumar, are players, gun licences and a Nano, the ultra- being told otherwise, and health workers, low-cost Indian car. such as Ms. Raja, are pushed to meet quo- Often sterilizations are done at breath- tas, he says, it’s a local aberration: A district taking speed, with a doctor performing as politician may be keen to boost his reputa-

62 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india tion and “if, in his over-enthusiasm, he does achieved 80 per cent of its target for women something ...” last year - but sterilized none of the 400 Anjali Sen, director for South Asia with men. the International Planned Parenthood Fed- There is a widespread belief, rarely chal- eration, says India’s policy was drafted with lenged by doctors, that sterilization weak- the best of intentions, but she does not buy ens a man and “robs him of his powers,” as Dr. Sikdar’s claim that there are no targets. women in Kamrora say. State family-planning budgets come from All of the government outreach about Delhi, she explains, and “cash incentives are family planning - all the home visits and tacit acceptance [of targets] from the cen- chat circles Ms. Raja organizes - focus on tral government.” women. But ask the women if they actually Ms. Uppal, the activist, says national of- make the decisions about children and birth ficials could easily make sure the system is control, and they burst into laughter. target-free: “They’re the cops.” Even Dr. Sikdar acknowledges the prob- Dr. Sikdar says India is launching a new lem - he oversees a $20-million program incentive program under which 860,000 that distributes free condoms to women health workers such as Ms. Raja will be paid who have “no control over fertility.” $10 for every woman persuaded to delay her Or as Ms. Uppal puts it: “These completely first child for two years after marriage, and disempowered women take condoms home another $10 if she waits two years before to their husbands as if somehow they are having a second. going to be able to convince them to use Left unexplained is just how the women them.” are supposed to avoid getting pregnant. Dr. Das says the service delivery will not Certainly no one is relying on husbands change as long as policy springs from a to sort it out. During the Indira Gandhi era, belief that the “wrong” people are having most sterilizations were performed on men children. - there was no way to do a tubal ligation “Our development priority is not to re- without invasive surgery, and female doc- duce family size, it’s to raise income. We’re tors, whom women patients prefer, were not ashamed of the inequalities, of low edu- rare. cation attainment, of poverty - why are we Vasectomies are still less complicated, ashamed of population growth?” but 95 per cent of the operations are now ‘I nearly bled to death’ on women. Mr. Kumar says Mahoba district Noni Raja has thought a lot about choices,

63 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india and who gets to make them. Two years after her bold decision to have a tubal ligation, she received a brutal reminder of her place in the family hierarchy. In 2008, her younger son died at the age of 1 from pneumonia that the local health centre failed to treat. She lost her bold, chat- tering boy - and something else. Her in-laws were unwilling to accept a daughter-in-law they felt had failed in her most important responsibility. So they scraped together a small fortune, and took Ms. Raja to Jhansi, a city about eight hours away by bus, where they paid a surgeon to reverse her tubal ligation - a rare and complicated surgery. The operation went badly. “I nearly bled to death,” Ms. Raja recalls flatly. But she came home and, two years later, produced that mandatory second son. Her place in the family was once more secure. Today, that last baby is everyone’s mop- haired pet; mother and grandmother com- pete over whose lap he will lounge in. Ms. Devi is defensive - but unrepentant about the extreme lengths they went to in the quest for another boy. “All the neigh- bours said it was not done, to have only one son,” she explains. “We were under pres- sure.”

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PHOTO: LANA SLEZIC Dying to get ahead

There’s an alarming, ongoing rash of suicides among ‘lower-caste’ students who’ve earned places in the elite ranks of Indian education. Despite the country’s claims to be a sleek 21st-century meritocracy, the habits of centuries of discrimination and social exclusion are not so easily shaken. Stephanie Nolen reports the students’ disturbing tales as part of her continuing investigation into how India’s schools and other institutions might heal – or deepen – historic wounds The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

NEW DELHI – The sharply truncated life of Anil He was 22. Meena was marked by a ferocious tenacity. His death was a crippling blow to his fam- From the mud house in rural Rajasthan, ily, a shock to his friends and an ugly blem- where he grew up in a family of subsistence ish for AIIMS. It was also the 20th reported farmers, he made his way first to school and suicide in four years at an elite Indian edu- then to the top of his class. cational institution by a student who was He studied with monomaniacal intensity either aboriginal or Dalit - the people from and passed the entrance exam to the All- the bottom of the Hindu caste system, once India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), known as untouchables. the most prestigious of India’s professional The suicides have emerged as a subject for colleges - an achievement almost unfath- fierce debate. Following the promise of the omable in the largely illiterate aboriginal new India, these students are hyper-achiev- community from which he came. ers from the grimmest of backgrounds, who At AIIMS, he battled through classes made it into the schools that produce engi- where he couldn’t understand a word of neers, doctors and business leaders who are the English being spoken and pored over a sought the world over. dictionary to get through textbooks. But when they get there, they are often When an arbitrary rule change - that isolated, humiliated and discriminated just happened to affect only students from against. They are told overtly by their pro- backgrounds such as his - cost him a pass- fessors that they will never make it to gradu- ing grade in a crucial exam, he tried repeat- ation. Yet many feel they cannot drop out edly to meet his course director, his friends - families and communities are invested in say. He sat outside the man’s office for four their success, and many have taken huge or five hours at a time for a week. loans. But Mr. Meena had come up against Some, trapped in this dilemma, have cho- something his intelligence and persever- sen to end their lives. ance could not overcome: Students of his In the very places that produce the inno- kind are not welcome at AIIMS, no more vators who are supposed to shape its future, than they are at other prestigious Indian India is dogged by the darkest forces from universities. They rarely graduate. No one its past. was prepared to help him succeed. “It’s very pervasive and very invisible,” On March 3, Mr. Meena hung himself says Shweta Barge, who monitors educa- from the fan in his small dormitory room. tional discrimination for the National Cam-

66 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india paign for Dalit Human Rights. From a Dalit kund Bharti, 25, was just weeks away from community herself, Ms. Barge often tried to earning his degree, something unprecedent- keep her identity cloaked as she managed to ed in his community in Madhya Pradesh. earn a postgraduate degree. “Those [Hindu] His parents, who’d taken out massive ideas of purity and pollution exist across ev- loans to support him, told a team from of ery stream, in every school. It gets to hard- investigators from the Insight Foundation, core Indian values: It’s not just about where which works to support Dalit and aboriginal you reach; it’s about where you came from.” students, that he repeatedly complained of harassment from his professors. A grim tally He said that one often complained, “I don’t know where they come from, these The suicides have occurred at 16 different Dalits and [aboriginals], getting here with- institutions, including the Indian Institutes out studying anything.” of Technology (IIT) and at the universities Yet Mr. Bharti was, in fact, brilliant. He of Hyderabad and Bangalore. had scored eighth among hundreds of thou- In 2008, a final-year Dalit medical student sands of students nationwide in the intense- at Government Medical College in Chan- ly competitive engineering entrance exam digarh in the Punjab hung himself in the - he passed up the seat to become a doctor college library; Jaspreet Singh left a note in instead. AIIMS carried out no investigation his pocket describing how the head of his and says he had psychological problems. department told him repeatedly to his face And this April, an MBA student hanged that he would never, ever be permitted to be herself at a private college in Gurgaon, the a doctor. new technology and industry hub on the That professor had failed him several edge of Delhi. Dana Sangma was aborigi- times in course work, although Mr. Singh nal, from Meghalaya state in India’s remote had never before had anything but top northeast. marks. After his death, an external commit- The university quickly released the expla- tee re-evaluated his exams and found that nation that she was distraught after being he should have passed. He was awarded his caught cheating on an exam - but her uncle, degree posthumously. her home state’s chief minister, who had On March 3, 2010, exactly two years before personally enrolled his niece at the high- Mr. Meena’s death, another young aborigi- priced school, called that claim preposter- nal man killed himself at AIIMS. Bal Mu- ous.

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He registered a complaint with the Na- program’s full implementation until recent- tional Commission of Schedule Castes and ly. Tribes, saying she had been driven to sui- Today, there is a politically incorrect tint cide by harassment at the college. to complaining about reservations, but India has one of the highest rates of sui- many dominant-caste students still resent cide in the world, especially in the age group them. of college students. But these deaths stand India is desperately short of higher-educa- out because of the clear connection, often tion institutions. The Ministry of Human Re- described in suicide notes, with the discrim- source Development says the country needs ination the victim endured. at least 1,500 more - 520,000 students wrote Meritocracy on trial the entrance exam for the IIT this year, com- The issue goes to the heart of a story that peting for fewer than 10,000 spots. India wants to tell about itself these days: A degree from one of the elite engineer- that traditional guarantees of privilege - ing or medical institutes is a ticket to a life wealth and caste - are losing power in favour of comfort. But the competition for seats, of merit. combined with the reservations, means the But if that is at all true, it is thanks largely admission cutoff - the minimum grade for to the program of “reservations” - a form acceptance - for non-reserved students hov- of affirmative action under which all pub- ers in the high 90s. licly funded educational institutions must Dalit students are perceived as taking reserve about 40 per cent of their seats for seats that should go to students who scored aboriginal (or “tribal”), Dalit and “other higher. Indeed, there are thoughtful critics, backward caste” students. such as the leading New Delhi public intel- A percentage of jobs in government in- lectual Gucharan Das, who point out that stitutions are also reserved, as are political inequality in India today does not always seats in municipal government. follow traditional lines - some in the “other The education reservations were set out backward caste” groups are prospering, but in the Indian constitution adopted in 1950, they pressed to be included among the res- although it was decades before there was ervations, while other poor people are left more than a handful of such students who out. even reached the point of applying, and But those are the exceptions. Anoop Ku- uproars from dominant-caste students and mar, who runs the Insight Foundation, says their families were a consistent drag on the most of the backlash against reservations

68 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india comes from an (often deliberate) misun- isolation - rooted in the idea that Dalits and derstanding of the principle. “People are aboriginals are “unclean” - permeates col- defining merit strictly in terms of marks in lege life. They are shunned in dining halls the entrance exam, and that conveniently and dorms and mocked in classes, ever discounts all the other factors affecting the reminded of their marginalization. performance of the students,” he says. This has a debilitating effect on students “So a student from an urban, upper-caste, who always thought of themselves as upper-class background who has both par- achievers. ents literate and studied at a an elite, private “You go for [an oral examination] and [English-language] school is considered they ask you your name and where you are more ‘meritorious’ when he or she has from, and you say Meena from Rajasthan - 85-per-cent marks, than a reservation-cat- they say, ‘ Oh, okay,’ “ says Jagram Meena, egory student who goes to a terrible gov- 20, who was a close friend of Anil Meena’s ernment school in [Hindi] and has no one (but no relation - their surname is given to in the family who is literate but still scores all in their caste group). 75-per-cent marks.” He says such exchanges have a direct Yet their dominant-caste peers still grouse effect on his performance: “You feel de- that the reserved-category students would humanized and you forget everything you never make it if they had to compete on an want to say. They are saying, ‘Okay, you are a open field. Their professors often share that reservation-category student and you don’t view: As Ms. Barge points out, the faculty in know anything.’ You’re marked from that these prestigious institutes is overwhelm- moment.” ing made up of people from the dominant castes, since only a single generation of An inquiry ignored Dalits really has had the chance for a profes- sional education. In 2006, a series of protests by Dalit and “They have this idea rooted in their aboriginal students at AIIMS complaining psyche that tribal and Dalit students ‘don’t of discrimination prompted the central have the merit and can’t match up to us,’ “ government to appoint Sukhadeo Thorat, says Ajita Rao, a Dalit medical doctor who a prominent academic from a Dalit back- studies discrimination in professional edu- ground, to investigate. cation. “That’s the hidden thing.” His three-person commission found Dr. Rao says that resentment, hostility and dorms segregated by caste, students subject-

69 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india ed to open hostility by their teachers and In the wake of Anil Meena’s death, the even physical attacks by dominant-caste administration acknowledges only that he students on those they considered inferior. had been depressed about failing an exam The Thorat report said these students con- and was struggling with English. sistently reported having less time with oral “This was a tragic event,” says Rakesh examiners, and being asked their surname Yadav, AIIMS’s subdean for academic issues. in unnecessary situations. It faulted AIIMS “No institution wants that.” for failing to provided language support The school did offer financial compensa- to students coming from Hindi- language tion to Mr. Meena’s parents. But Dr. Yadav schools and for relying heavily on subjec- rejects the idea that the university’s conduct tive assessments rather than more objective had any role. “It is absolutely not true. All tests. support any [medical] student needs is pro- Also, in a grim foreshadowing of the ex- vided - the faculty and the administration is perience Anil Meena would describe a few always there to help out.” years later - the report criticized cases of Dr. Yadav will agree that the area of lan- sudden rule changes that had a dispropor- guage support might be insufficient - that tionate impact on reserved-category stu- an hour a day might not be enough to get a dents. unilingual Hindi student through a medical In Mr. Meena’s case, the weight given to curriculum. “It’s basically a language prob- one assessment was changed to 50 from lem.” 25 per cent, seemingly arbitrarily, after the Beyond that, however, he says there was exam had been conducted. This caused him “no discrimination” in AIIMS. “If you say and many other students to fail - almost all faculty are doing the discrimination - it’s reservation students, said Mahinder Meena, too much. ... They assess students based on an intern at AIIMS (also from the Rajasthani marks.” aboriginal community) who helped orga- As for bias, he adds, there are processes to nize protests after the suicide. The Thorat prevent any individual professor from vin- report recorded a pattern of such incidents. dictively undermining a student, but clinical AIIMS’s administration rejected the re- skills, for example, must by definition be port “in totality,” calling it biased, although evaluated in person: “To modify it to be 100 under public pressure it did increase its per cent objective - it’s not possible.” language-learning support. However, after Anil Meena’s death, AIIMS Discrimination denied contacted Prof. Thorat again and asked him

70 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india to return to the school to investigate, which “Our fear about his suicide,” Mahinder he considers a major improvement over the says, “is that it will change nothing.” hostile reception to his last inquiry. “This time there is an attitude to do some- thing about the problem they face,” he says. “I have a feeling that because of these two suicides ... it shook the faculty and teachers.” Jagram Meena hopes so. He points out that his friend Anil placed 400th in the all-India medical entrance exam, far higher than most of the general-category students at AIIMS. They both certainly struggled in their first year - they had to consult the dictionary 10 times to read a single page of their text- books - but Anil was managing. He played Bollywood music loudly to relax, or joined friends - mostly from his caste group - for cricket in the courtyard. His father and brother were taking loans to send him fees every month. He was coping, Jag- ram says, until the rules kept shifting. “We’re in no way lower than the general- category students,” says Jagram, sipping tea at the canteen outside the student dorm. “One day,” he says - when the public schools that prepare Dalit and aboriginal kids are as good as everyone else’s - “we’ll all be one category.” But Mahinder Meena cuts him off, de- manding to know how change like that could come as long as it’s almost impossible for Dalit students to succeed.

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PHOTO: CANDACE FEIT Sister Sudha’s dilemma:

You can unlock the potential of India’s most oppressed girls, but they still have to find a place to use it The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

Danapur, India – The girls are giggly, jostling Sister Sudha watches them head down with excitement in the warm autumn sun. the path, then closes the black iron gate and Sister Sudha Varghese stands patiently and sits on the school steps. The girls stayed up waits for their attention. When her 125 stu- all night, giddy about the holidays. Now, dents fall quiet in the courtyard outside the school is startlingly quiet, and she will their yellow dormitory, she gives them a last worry all week until they are safely back gentle lecture. with her. “Don’t get sick,” she tells them in Bhoj- Prerna - the word means “inspiration” - is puri. “Go and visit the festival shrines, but a school for Mushahar girls, “untouchables” don’t roam around at night. Enjoy your at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, holiday. Come back in a week.” which makes them the most exploited chil- Her tone is light, but a filament of anxiety dren in the most marginalized community runs underneath the words: Come back. in the poorest state in India. She looks them over one last time, then Girls such as Poonam are often married sends her charges out through the gates off by the age of 12 or 13. As Mushahar girls, of Prerna Residential School for Mahadalit they are widely seen as without rights, and Girls, to join the parents who have been easy targets for sexual assault. If they are waiting outside since early morning. The raped, their own community views them as girls are headed on a rare visit home to the unmarriageable, so practical parents think slums and villages where they grew up, to it best to have them married before they can celebrate the festival of Dushera. be attacked and tarnished. Poonam, 15, a star student and school “They go home, and the grandmother leader, is one of the last to head out the says, ‘She has become big enough - we gate. Her mother, Rajkumari, waits for her should look for a boy,’ “ Sister Sudha ex- nervously, pulling the end of her yellow plains with a sigh. That means the end of sari tight over her head. The two have not a girl’s studies and, more than likely, the seen each other for six months, and they quick erosion of everything she has gained are shy at first; they sneak small sideways at Prerna, in a life of relentless physical glances outside the school as they look for a labour. rickshaw or a horse cart to take them home Sister Sudha, a Catholic nun turned qui- to their village, Jamsaut. After four years of etly radical social activist, came to Bihar regular meals at school, Poonam is a head from the south of India more than 40 years taller than her mother, but still respectful. ago. She went to live in Jamsaut and dedi-

73 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india cated herself to working with the Mushahar rarely a good thing. to end their exploitation: She fought legal Four girls from Prerna have completed cases, organized demonstrations and set up high school so far. They went back to their a network of education centres for women villages and married (at least one, Sister in dozens of communities in the state of Sudha says wistfully, found an educated Bihar. boy). They also got jobs as vikas mithra, Six years ago, she left the village and be- liaisons between local government and the gan an experiment. She was troubled that Mushahar, earning $90 a month - a consid- Mushahar girls were unwelcome in most erable accomplishment. schools and constantly in demand for do- But Sister Sudha wants much more for her mestic and farm labour for their parents. girls: vocational training, perhaps for jobs She suspected that if she could boost them as receptionists or data-entry clerks. Uni- into a new world, in which they were treated versity for the clever ones, such as Poonam. with dignity and tasked only with learning, And then professional jobs, and marriage, of they might emerge as leaders - a vanguard course, but to educated men. for change. None of it sounds impossible. Until you She decided to bring in one or two girls are back in Jamsaut. from each community in a four-hour radius. When they first come to her they are shy The invisible fence and hunched, like the parents who waited at the gates. But six months later, they have An hour after leaving school, Poonam and begun to learn that they have every right to Rajkumari (the family’s only surname is a take up space - to have ideas, expectations caste name they do not use) arrive at the and ambitions. small road that branches to Jamsaut, lined Yet Sister Sudha’s anxiety as the girls with small shops and a brightly painted leave for Dushera hints at the deep fissure Hindu temple. They hurry past these to the that runs through her experiment: Her girls Mushahar tola - the small patch of land re- are now caught between their old lives and served for people of their caste, behind the their new potential. They have learned to village proper, bordered by swamp. dream, but their families, their villages and Their house is a half-brick, half-mud struc- India itself have little place for a Mushahar ture about the size of a master bathroom in girl with dreams. Now, they stand out - and a Canadian suburban home, with a roof of when you are Mushahar and female, that’s twigs laid over scrap sheeting.

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Poonam rushes to hug her younger sisters dressed men from the dominant caste in the and brother, then turns to the tasks that village; one sports a large gold watch. Rajku- made up her days before she moved away mari pulls her sari over her face. Everyone to Prerna: She fetches water in a tin pot looks down. One of the men stands above from the tola’s hand pump, chases a fam- Poonam’s aunt, who is seated in the only ily of pigs away from the entranceway of chair, and glares - she moves to sit in the dirt the house and lights a dried cake of buffalo nearby, and he takes the plastic chair. The dung in the hearth, filling the unventilated men start to fire questions at Rajkumari: house with noxious smoke, to make tea Who are the foreigners, and why are they with a handful of loose leaves and a pinch of here in the tola? black pepper. The women pull their children close. Raj- Her mother asks her to go to the shop, kumari mutters an answer and fidgets in the passing her a crumpled 20-rupee note dirt. The visiting reporter and photographer (about 35 cents). The fastest route would introduce themselves; the reporter explains be to go behind the house and cut 15 me- that they are trying to learn about the lives tres across an empty green field, past other, of the Mushahar. The men smirk. larger houses, to the small village store. But “Their life has changed, become better. she turns the long way down the path - and They’re educated. They go out to work,” when a foreign visitor heads for the short- says one, Rajesh Gupta, with a confidence cut, Poonam gasps and yanks her back. It is at odds with the untruth of his statement. as if there is an invisible electric barrier, and “Earlier, they were the ones who took any- she will not step over it. She flinches if she thing, without retaliation. Now, they stand even comes close. up for themselves.” He does not make it When the visitor asks her why, Poo- sound like a positive innovation. nam, normally quick with observations, is The men stay and glower a while longer, stumped. Her people live here. Others live then walk off, laughing loudly. The reporter over there - and she does not know them, asks Rajkumari if she has ever been to does not talk to them, does not meet their any of their houses. She looks baffled: “Of eyes on the road and never, ever takes the course not.” footpath past their houses. She casts an uneasy glance at her eldest About an hour after Poonam returns daughter. Tall and clear-skinned, Poonam is to the village, three men arrive outside such a different creature from the grubby, her house: They are lighter-skinned, well- runny-nosed, half-clad children of the tola.

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The upper-caste men have noticed her, and the lives of many Dalits. So have the more Rajkumari saw them noticing. recent processes of economic liberaliza- tion and urbanization. In the 1980s, Dalits A relic that still rules emerged as a powerful voting bloc in many states, and Dalit-based political parties have The invisible fences that keep Poonam in since had a key role in forming governing one small corner of Jamsaut were built at coalitions at the national and state level. least 2,000 years ago, laid out in ancient The system has helped to create Dalit Hindu texts that specify rigid social stratifi- judges, professors and business leaders, pro- cation into four castes, divided by occupa- voking deep bitterness in some dominant- tion, with priestly Brahmins at the top and caste Hindus, who claim that their own craftspeople at the bottom. children can no longer get into college or Below them is the fifth category, the the civil service. Many social programs also “untouchable,” the outcastes - or, as many aim to improve life for Dalits, including the call themselves, Dalits, from the Sanskrit Bihar government’s “Mahadalit Mission,” for “broken people” - consigned to tasks which provides Sister Sudha funds to feed deemed polluting (working with leather, the girls of Prerna. sweeping streets), and excluded from al- Yet hundreds of thousands of Indians still most all contact with the rest of society. In use the services of valmiki, or manual scav- this region, the lowest rung is reserved for engers, who collect human waste and carry the Mushahar, traditionally known as rat- it away in baskets - a system viewed by some catchers. caste Hindus as less polluting than using a All of this may sound like an ancient relic, latrine. A recent national survey found that with little relevance in the “Incredible In- 45 per cent of villages maintain a “two-tum- dia” of the tourism billboards, the emerg- bler” system, in which separate dishes are ing international powerhouse. The Indian kept for Dalits to use at tea stands. And even constitution adopted in 1950 outlawed caste with her new education, Poonam will not discrimination, and set aside 15 per cent of take the shortcut past caste Hindus’ houses, seats in government jobs and public educa- ever. tional institutions for Dalits, who make up a In the nation’s newspapers, every single sixth of the population. day, there is a report of an attack on Dalits Those “reservations,” as they are known - who try to enter a temple, a Dalit woman a form of affirmative action - have improved who resists sexual advances by dominant-

76 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india caste men or Dalits who try to use a village the education or economic mobility that hand pump. Last year, police registered might bring some social change. The caste 38,597 cases of caste-based violence, rang- system governs life in Jamsaut today much ing from rape to arson to assault. The real as it did 1,000 years ago. number is probably much higher - research Poonam had not thought much about by the National Campaign on Dalit Human caste before she went to Prerna. Now, she Rights has found that only one in five such considers it curiously. “Before, we weren’t attacks is ever reported to the police. able to go into the temples,” she notes. But India’s government prefers to focus “Now, we can. And in the past if we touched on the success stories. When activists tried any of their belongings, they would never to have caste included in a United Nations use them again.” declaration on discrimination in 2001, the She doesn’t think that happens any more government lobbied ferociously to keep - though in fact she has rarely tried to touch it out. The government has consistently anything belonging to a dominant-caste moved to block investigations or discussion person. When Sister Sudha took the chil- by the UN Commissioner for Human Rights dren to a festival at a temple, dominant- into caste-based discrimination. caste families let them in, but scrubbed it After 21 years in Jamsaut observing all this down ostentatiously after they left. at close range, Sister Sudha has developed Poonam has no higher-caste friends in a grimly pragmatic analysis. Caste gets a re- Jamsaut. Before she left, when she attended ligious gloss, she says, but religions change: the village school, other girls were careful Caste is jealously protected because it is in to keep her from touching their papers or truth an economic system, a power relation- pens, and would not pass her a book. When ship. “The status quo has to be maintained she went to collect firewood, people would so that the benefits that are there can con- hiss, “Mushahar,” toss rocks and chase her tinue: You get cheap labour. You get people off. at your beck and call for almost nothing. The biggest change in Jamsaut is that Poo- You have the machinery to terrorize them nam now thinks that’s a problem. into obedience with almost no resistance, no opposition.” The first of Sudha’s girls The Mushahar, who own no land and sub- sist on farm labour that pays at best a dollar For a vision of what her future may look or two a day, rarely can give their children like, Poonam need only look about 100 me-

77 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india tres from her home. At the end of the lane She got a job as a teacher in a government is a house of much the same type, which school - the first person in the tola to move belongs to a woman named Lalmathi. into the professional world. They have two She is Sister Sudha’s pride and joy: When children; their small house has an electric the nun first came to live in Jamsaut almost connection, and the children have plastic 30 years ago, Lalmathi was a tiny girl who trucks and dolls to play with. ran about in a pair of torn knickers, waving Lalmathi is a warm woman, quick to a stick to herd pigs. But in the evenings she laugh. But in her quiet moments, she ar- began to come to Sister Sudha, who used ticulates a deep unease. The tola is the only the stick to teach her to draw letters in the home she has known, but increasingly she dirt. She convinced Lalmathi’s parents that thinks that she and her family should leave. she should go to school - the dominant- She would like to continue her education, caste people in the village didn’t like it, and she wants her children to go to a good but she made it through to matriculation, school. coached by Sister Sudha the whole way. “I would move to the city - to anywhere Whom Lalmathi would marry became a with a proper environment to study,” she focus of discussion for the whole communi- says in one breath. “But if I stay, I might ty. Caste rules said she must marry a Musha- influence others to get educated.” har, but by the time she graduated she was That’s one problem - her sense of respon- in her 20s, almost unimaginably old, and sibility, of how profoundly Sister Sudha vastly different from any of the illiterate changed her own life. In addition, though, labourers she might have been expected to it’s not as easy as simply heading for the wed. city. In Patna, the capital of Bihar, the Sister Sudha went on a search, and in a Mushahar live in tola as well - there is no community in central Bihar found a young guarantee a dominant-caste landlord will Mushahar man, Biteshwar, who was also un- rent to her family. married and unusually bright. Lalmathi met It might be easier in Delhi, but that would him and grilled him: He had a bachelor’s be so far away from family, and they might degree, he didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble, he have to adopt a non-Dalit surname to rent a was going to try to go to law school and he room. wanted her to keep studying after they mar- It is absurd, she says, for anyone to argue ried. He became her husband and came to that caste is not a factor in India any more. live in her community. When she cycles through dominant-caste ar-

78 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india eas on her way to work, people call out and India, is a prominent activist against caste mock her for her above-herself ambitions. discrimination. She runs the Centre for So- At work, she says, “I sit down in meetings cial Equity and Exclusion in New Delhi; her and everyone shifts away.” husband, Paul Divakar, heads the National She has her own defences firmly in place. Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. They are “I just ignore them. I think they are mad long-time allies of Sister Sudha and have people. ... I stayed with Sudha a long time: I visited the communities where she works. learned a lot about caste, and that gives me Most Dalit groups have seen some social the strength to reject it.” mobility, Ms. Namala says, but the Musha- But what about her children? What if she har in Bihar have experienced almost no sends them to a city school and people find reduction in discrimination and isolation. out they are Mushahar? That is the first challenge for Sister Sudha’s “People think, ‘What can a Mushahar do? girls: “Mushahar” will always be the defin- Catch fish or snails to eat - they can’t be ing fact of their identity. engineers. Why send the kids to school? A What’s more, they are girls. “Even in the Mushahar can only be a Mushahar.’” Mushahar community, the girls are the bot- In a strange way, she thinks, they are saf- tom of the bottom,” Ms. Namala says with est here in the tola, where, if they keep to a sigh, reflecting late one night in her Delhi their own hand pump and their own path- office. ways, the risks are minimized. This parallel system of oppression tends So, for now, she stays. And she watches to get even less attention in India than caste. Poonam on her visits home, and wonders There was much startled denial here last how soon the choice will come for the Pre- June, when a wide-ranging global survey by rna girls - either staying near their families the British Thomson-Reuters Foundation or moving into a world where the risks and rated India as the fourth-worst country in rules are unknowable for them. the world in which to be a woman, below Whatever they do, whole communities are even Somalia. going to feel the reverberations. The survey cited high rates of sex traffick- The long odds ing and the widespread practices of child Much farther away, Annie Namala is also marriage (47 per cent of Indian women watching Poonam and the other girls of marry before they are 18, Unicef says) and Prerna. forced marriage, plus the persistent prefer- Ms. Namala, a Dalit from the south of ence for sons, leading to an estimated 12

79 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india million girls going “missing” because of sex- never dream of marrying them, but will use selective abortion in the past 25 years. gifts and promises to try to lure them into The success of a handful of powerful fe- extramarital relationships. male political leaders is often cited to refute Meanwhile, they will be living entirely allegations of pervasive misogyny. Yet In- outside the world known by their parents dia’s rates of violence against women and and families, almost unimaginably alone, sexual harassment are exceedingly high, when all their lives they have lived, eaten while Indian women’s rates of work-force and slept in close confines. They will have participation, social mobility and power to to find ways to keep in touch with their own make their own decisions domestically and people. “There have to be times when they otherwise are some of the lowest, in devel- come back together,” Ms. Namala says. oped or developing nations. From watching them, she says, she knows This is the second set of obstacles for the the girls already have resilience. But now Prerna girls. “Imagine the pain they are go- they will need something else. “You have to ing to have if they hold their heads high,” build up the anger in them, righteous anger: Ms. Namala says. Yet despite it all, she does You cannot just hope for justice - they will believe that Poonam can achieve her dream need that to sustain them.” of being a teacher and even a school head- She pauses and looks troubled, then mistress, that her friend Laxmi can wear the seems to square her shoulders on the girls’ judge’s robes she dreams of and that Neetu behalf. “Most of the reforms we’ve had come can be a district administrator. when one person takes it on and creates “It’s going to be tough, but the transition a sea change. It’s possible,” she says. “Un- is possible. It’s going to take hand-holding. comfortable is good. It’s where growth takes They will need little pockets of sanctuary. place.” They will need one professor who will pro- tect them at college, a boss who will protect Mother courage them at jobs - each one’s story is going to be a struggle story.” For Poonam’s mother, Rajkumari, it’s all a To do that, though, they will need to go to terrible dilemma. By the time she was Poo- the city, and obscure as much of their pasts nam’s age, she was married. A Mushahar as they can. And then, Ms. Namala pre- mother traditionally has one primary job: to dicts, the girls will soon draw the attention keep her daughter safe (and virginal) until of dominant-caste men - men who would the day she is delivered to her new in-laws.

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But Rajkumari has another: to help Poonam someone is guarding her.” be all the things she dreams of. Still, a husband for Poonam will not be She is immensely proud of her daughter, the kind the village women are used to who is now in charge of reading any paper- inspecting, Rajkumari says. Her sisters and work the family needs for government wel- neighbours, listening in, nod in agreement. fare programs. The sole decoration on their “I’ll look for an educated man for her. I’m walls is a clock Poonam won in a debating not sure where, but I’ll look.” competition. Poonam listens too, and smiles shyly, head And Rajkumari is frank about the fact that down. Of course, her parents must make Poonam is the sole economic hope for their this decision for her. But they don’t exactly family of six: If she can finish school and understand what it is she would like to do. get a waged job, it could radically alter their They have never been anywhere like Prerna, fortunes. or the private school some of the students But Rajkumari, at 33, has perfected the attend during the day, where - even though Mushahar art of taking up no more space in the girls are the only Dalits - the teachers tell the world than she has to. To her, Poonam everyone that discrimination based on caste seems more and more like a foreign crea- is wrong, that everyone is equal. ture. That makes sense to Poonam. Other peo- “When we ask her about marriage, she ple have their ideas, but caste isn’t going to says,’I want to study, I want to become stop her from doing what she wants - going something.’” But if Poonam does get mar- to university, getting a job, having an inde- ried, she will become the property of her pendent life. “It’s just about what you have husband’s family - they probably won’t let in your mind,” she says quietly. her work, and if they do, the money won’t But Poonam also knows there is more to it come back here. So she wants Poonam to than that. She heard Sister Sudha’s warnings have a working life. about not visiting the festival shrines after Yet she sees her tall, strong daughter as dark, and she knows that a few years ago a acutely vulnerable, with all the attention girl from the village was grabbed and raped she attracts. So, while in one breath Rajku- by a group of dominant-caste men when she mari says she won’t mention marriage until was on her way to work the fields. The girl Poonam does, in the next she says, “I’m was dumped by the roadside and the police thinking to get her married, because that’s did nothing. Poonam knows the story well. a girl’s safety. A married woman is safer -

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Coming back, almost intact say the country has changed.”

When the festivals are over, the girls come trickling back to the school. Poonam arrives on Sunday night, delighted to return to her books. On Monday morning, Sister Sudha lines them up, and finds they have all come back but two: 12-year-old Sanju’s family has decided that she has had enough education. And the family of Dharajia, who is 14, has found her a husband, a boy from another tola. “They tried once before, in March, the last time she went home, “ Sister Sudha says. “I talked to her parents and said she’s not old enough. So I got her back. But now they were decided on getting her married.” She cannot afford the luxury of regret for more than a moment. She turns to her list of Mushahar families eager to send her their girls. Within a day or two, she has filled the lost girls’ bunks and has two more slight, wide-eyed students on her classroom benches. She can put aside the fear of losing them for six more months, until the next vaca- tion, and return her attention to what they will do next. “The whole country says, ‘We have changed. We have improved.’ But stand there,” she says, gesturing in the direction of Jamsaut, “and see what changes have come. ... Until it comes to Mushahar girls, you can’t

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Vasandi and a friend escaped bonded labour and are now learning tailoring skills from an NGO. PHOTO: STEPHANIE NOLEN Dowry schemes lure girls to bonded labour

If you got clothes as Christmas gifts this week, they may include cotton from Indian textile mills where low-caste teens work for illegally low pay, under dubious promises of a future ‘marriage bonus.’ Stephanie Nolen reports from Satyamangalam The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

Satyamangalam, INDIA – Vasandi heard the ears grew accustomed to the constant thun- girls in her village talking: Satellite televi- derous clatter in the mill, and she got used sion with movies. Air conditioning. Three to waking at dusk for a night shift. meals a day. Swimming pools. And after She was working at one of the hundreds three years, a bonus of 36,000 rupees (about of mills and dye operations and garment $650), a sum of money so huge she could factories that dot the plains of western barely picture what it might look like, all Tamil Nadu, spinning cotton for textile those rupees stacked in a heap. factories that supply the biggest European It could all be hers, if she were lucky and North American retail chains, including enough to work in a local textile mill, the many brands people found this week under girls said. their Christmas trees. They had heard the news from a recruiter, H&M, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Marks who was paid 1,500 rupees ($30) for each and Spencer have all sourced materials from new single girl he brought to the mill works, this area over the past few years. with its unending hunger for fit bodies to There were indeed movies on the dormi- keep the machines running 24 hours a day. tory TV, but she was usually too tired after To Vasandi (who, like many southern a 12-hour shift to watch them. There was a Indians, uses only one name) it sounded pool, where she dipped her feet, but none of splendid. She was 16. Not long before, she the girls knew how to swim. had left school after Grade 7. She was living She was desperately homesick. She had with her family in a stuffy one-room house never been away from her family and village in a rural village. before, and it would be six months before And so, in May, 2010, her father dropped she was allowed home for a few days’ visit. her at the gate of JV Spinning Mill outside And the dormitory warden bolted the door this small industrial town. She put her small on her building each night from the outside. bag of clothes in the dorm she would share Still, she was earning $50 a month, with with 320 other women, mostly Dalits like the promise of that bonus dangling a few herself, from the “untouchable” bottom of years in the future. So she tried to settle in. the Hindu caste system. Her parents were earning a couple of dol- Within days, she had been trained to run lars a day doing occasional agricultural la- skeins of cotton thread on to a giant spindle, bour - “coolie work,” as it is called in English and to clean cotton fibers off the machine and Tamil around here - on the farm of a continuously to keep it from jamming. Her dominant-caste landowner. But often there

84 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india was no work. And no one Vasandi knew - ment of the law that the textile mills market other than the mill girls - had ever had a the scheme with images of wedding jewel- steady, waged job. lery designed right into the logo. For a barely educated Dalit girl, it could Vasandi never found out what that many seem a rare opportunity, marketed as So- rupees look like all together. She left her job mangali Thittam, or “the marriage scheme” this past May, two years after she started: - an ostensible social-welfare plan provided She was anxious because girls were getting by the textile industry, as a payoff from injured or falling ill from overwork around India’s growing participation in the global her. She thought she would be given the economy. portion of her bonus she had earned - but Except for just a few details. the warden informed her that in leaving before the full three years, she would get ‘Bonus’ or bondage? nothing. She admits she should have seen it com- It was, for one thing, illegal. As a child under ing: In her two years at the mill, she had 18, she was by law required to be in school. only ever seen six girls out of some 600 She was also underpaid, earning less than receive their bonuses. Others were injured half even Tamil Nadu’s low minimum wage and let go or wore out and quit first - almost for apprentice textile workers, 196 rupees anyone close to the three-year mark would ($4) a day. (The mills counter that the lodg- be fired for some pretext or another, she ing and meals they provide, which are oblig- says. atory, represent the balance of the wages.) That practice was found to be widespread What’s more, unknown to Vasandi, the in an industry audit by the Centre for Re- money for that promised three-year bonus search on Multinational Corporations was being deducted from her own wages - (SOMO), a Netherlands-based independent making her, technically, a bonded labourer, non-profit research organization. which has been illegal in India since 1976. Asha Kowtal, general secretary of the All- Finally, the bonus was explicitly marketed India Dalit Women’s Rights Forum, says the as being for her dowry - the cash and jewel- Somangali schemes are nothing more than lery her parents would be expected to give the caste system reinvented for an industri- her in-laws at her marriage. Dowry has been alized economy. illegal in this country almost as long as “How many Brahmin girls do you find in bonded labour. But there is so little enforce- Somangali Thittam? How many Iyengar?”

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PHOTO: STEPHANIE NOLEN

she asks, referring to the occupation-based advocates for Dalits in bonded labour. In the groups that are considered to be the top of past several years, READ has attracted the the Hindu caste system. “Only untouchable attention of international ethical-trade cam- communities are making use of this. Some- paigners and thus of major clothing chains. body sitting in Toronto is buying a Banana In a statement, H&M, for example, says Republic T-shirt or a Gap one and not think- it views the “schemes as absolutely unac- ing about reinforcing the caste structure and ceptable,” but because the mills are only the patriarchy.” secondary suppliers, “we do not have direct contractual influence.” So it pressures its The supply-chain sidestep own suppliers to pressure theirs, and lends support to the ethical-trade groups, the The Somangali Thittam scheme has been in company says. place for about 10 years, says Karrupu Samy, After 112 garment workers, most of them who runs an organization called Rights, young women, died in a blaze in Ban- Education and Development (READ) that gladesh in November, companies whose

86 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india clothes were being stitched there, including Somangali Thittam; they told near-identical Walmart and Sears, said they had no idea stories. The JV Spinning Mill and the other that their products were being made in that factories involved all refused to answer factory, which had repeatedly been cited for questions or to admit a journalist. Of eight safety violations such as locked exits and other mills contacted, six refused to talk and blocked stairwells. two said the scheme had been stopped. The companies said that local middlemen SOMO says some have indeed stopped it. had subcontracted out their work, a murky But READ’s Mr. Samy has a darker reading: system that made the supply chain hard to “All the international brands know about follow - and which is equally common in Somangali now, so the factories call it by India. another name,” he says. International scrutiny has prompted some Staff with the Southern Indian Mills As- of the mills in Tamil Nadu to make improve- sociation also refused to answer questions, ments, such as introducing health insur- but in a recent public forum on the scheme ance, raising the minimum age of employ- a director described it as an “opportunity for ees and increasing the contact permitted the empowerment of women.” with families. It is true that the mill jobs are about the But India’s textile sector is so loosely or- only work on offer in this region for young ganized - and facing such intense competi- women with limited education. Female tion from China and Bangladesh - that mills workforce participation remains low, as few change their names often to make checks, jobs are believed appropriate for women. and in practice face little scrutiny, SOMO has And the caste system remains deeply en- found in repeated studies. trenched: Dalit girls are considered for even It says a majority of the mill workers are fewer jobs. still under 18, with as many as a fifth of “When I went to work, there was some them younger than 14. A 2010 investigation respect,” says Vasandi. “People said, ‘Okay, by the Tamil Nadu State Commission for these girls are earning money.’” Women estimated that 37,000 young wom- But Mr. Samy argues that the mills are en are employed in the Somangali scheme, preying on his community, and reinforcing across 900 mills in the state. the idea that these factory jobs are the best The Globe and Mail conducted lengthy in- these girls can hope for. “Only higher educa- terviews with five young women who have tion is going to change things,” he says. worked in the mills in the past year under Mr. Samy himself has a master’s degree

87 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india in social work, but he remains a rarity in raj didn’t imagine she was leaving school a caste group where tens of thousands of forever. “I had the plan to go back to school people still work in “manual scavenging” after the mill, but I haven’t. I wanted to be - collecting and disposing of human excre- a teacher, but now I’m too old to go back to ment. school and sit with all the small children.” “These companies interrupt the education Some textile companies offer continu- of these girls, and exploit them,” he says. ing education classes to support workers to “We need work, but not for under-18-year- finish high school, as Ms. Naharaj’s did - but olds.” only after a 10- or 12-hour shift. “I wanted to go to class. But it was that or sleeping. And ‘I’m too old to go back to school’ I was so tired.” The closest she got to school was to take magazines and joke books out Divya Naharaj was 14 and just past third of the library. grade (with illiterate parents and teach- These days she does housework; her two ers who rarely showed up at school, she younger sisters go to school and her parents had struggled to get even that far) when an work in the fields until after dark. agent came to her two-room house in the Ms. Kowtal of the Dalit Women’s Rights village of Mangalapuram to talk to her. Forum says the Somongali scheme perpetu- “He told me, ‘Your uncle’s daughter is ates the idea that a woman’s worth is in her working there and you can also go and marriage, and that she is a financial burden your family’s problems will be solved,’” she to her family. But she isn’t surprised to see said. “My parents have only coolie work, so it so openly marketed, because the Tamil they don’t earn much, and they have three Nadu government does it too - offering four daughters” - so a hefty dowry bill loomed on grams of gold and $500 of “marriage as- their horizon. sistance” to any girl who completes high Ms. Naharaj went to the S. M. Mill in Shak- school. ti in January, 2010, learned to operate a knit- The state’s chief minister, Jayalalitha, tri- ting loom, and stuck it out for 19 months, umphantly introduced the plan a couple of working a cycle of four days of night shifts years ago as part of a spate of measures she and seven days of day shifts, with a day off claimed would boost the status of women, in between. She described her time at the openly defying the national dowry ban. mill in a grim, flat voice. Ms. Kotwal calls this a classic Indian para- When she left to start working, Ms. Naha- dox: The country has excellent laws on

88 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india paper, but zero enforcement when it comes to the interests of the poor, marginalized or out-caste. One reason the mills like the scheme, READ’s Mr. Samy says, is that the teenage female workers can all be classed as appren- tices, and thus by law can’t organize into labour unions. READ attempts to advocate for them; for example, it is trying to help Vasandi get her withheld wages. It also tries to give young women who leave the mills job training - the state government is supposed to provide them low-interest loans to start small busi- nesses, but the reality is that most get mar- ried when they go home, and do not do paid work again, except in landlords’ fields. Vasandi is learning to stitch clothes, but she is also waiting for a wedding. “My par- ents are looking for a boy,” she says, ducking her head shyly. And her parents will borrow money to pay her dowry - a big pile of rupees.

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PHOTO: SIMON DE TREY-WHITE The dire straits of being single and female in India

As a brutal rape shocks male-dominated India into discussing the status of women, a movement grows that gives a voice to those with little standing – widows, divorcées, the abandoned and the never-married The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

NEW DELHI – Saraswati Singh came into the abandoned, separated and widowed women world on Aug. 15, 1947, and that, she says, – was meeting to try to advance its agenda may be why her life turned out the way it of rights for single women. has. “I was born on Independence Day and Over the past two weeks, women’s rights up until now I’m independent.” have become the subject of emotional de- She is the daughter of a farmer in bate and protests in India, prompted by the Jharkhand, in the east of India, and from a gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a mov- caste where girls were married off by the age ing bus here. The woman died on Saturday. of 9 or 10. She persuaded her parents she The situation for single women is par- should stay in school until the eighth grade. ticularly dire – widows are meant to receive When they found a husband for her, he was pensions from the Indian government illiterate. She balked. The groom’s family (about $10 a month), but separated and was so insulted, they swiftly married him abandoned women do not. Divorced wom- to a more grateful girl. Ms. Singh became en are, in theory, entitled to a share of fami- tainted goods: She remembers her mother ly property, but many women never succeed and aunts wailing that no one would marry in getting a husband who leaves them to her now. That suited her just fine. She went grant a divorce, and so cannot make a claim, to nursing school, started a social-develop- explains forum president Nirmal Chandel. ment organization and got into politics. And while in rare cases divorced and sepa- And she stayed single. It is difficult to rated women may succeed in getting a court overstate just how rare a choice this was – order for alimony from their husbands, or is – in India. The critical importance of those judgments are rarely enforced, and marriage, particularly for women, is one of these women are typically left in penury, the few values shared across all caste, ethnic she says. and religious groups in this vast country. A The forum’s network of branches also woman’s marriage is the event on which her supports women resisting the oppressive family is focused from her birth. social customs that continue to blight the Ms. Singh’s choice not to marry is so un- lives of widows. common that she was a rarity even at a Ms. Chandel, for example, was married at recent annual gathering of India’s National 22 in her small town in Himachal Pradesh in Forum for Single Women’s Rights, for which the north. Her husband died mysteriously she serves on the national executive. The two years later. Within hours, the stunned organization – made up mostly of divorced, Ms. Chandel was set upon by her in-laws,

91 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india who removed her jewellery, her lipstick and have them, you have no importance.” her coloured clothes, and the mattress from One snowy-haired widow in a burgundy her bed. She was dressed in a stark white cotton saree nodded approvingly in the back saree, made to sleep on the floor, given plain row while Ms. Chandel spoke. Ginny Srivas- food at meal times, and barred from any tava, 70, was born and raised in Burlington, family gathering – customary treatment for a Ont. But 43 years ago, she fell in love with a Hindu widow. When her in-laws sat together, fellow education student at graduate school she would overhear them blaming her ill luck in Toronto; they married and came back to for her husband’s death. his native Rajasthan. They became social After nearly a year of this, she caught sight activists, working to fight poverty, and they of herself in a mirror, and thought, “I under- noticed the dire straits in which many wid- stand I’ve lost a husband but does it mean I ows lived. They helped to set up an organiza- also don’t live?” She heard about the forum, tion called The Association of Strong Women and snuck out of the house to attend a meet- Alone, the first such group of single women, ing. Before long, she had a job as a co-ordina- in 2000. Four years later, they held a meeting tor with a local aid organization, and moved to which they drew 1,500 single women from to another town. Her family, and her in-laws, 11 states to a song-filled gathering in Jaipur, were aghast. “My mother would say, ‘How and these most marginalized of women be- will you survive, alone?’” gan to plot a national lobbying effort. Today, at 47, she walks with her chin lifted, Yet around this time Ms. Srivastava’s hus- shoulders square – not widow posture – and band, Om, died – and suddenly she had a new she wore a salwar-kameez of purple, orange, and visceral understanding of how a woman red and blue, with heavy turquoise and gold without a husband is simply discounted. “A costume jewellery, when she addressed the lot of human resource is just locked up and forum. She seemed, in effect, to be demand- suppressed,” she says. ing that the world see her. That is the greatest Many things in the new India are chang- challenge for single women in India, she says: ing, but the primacy of marriage is not one of Without a husband, they do not exist – every them – the last census revealed that women government form asks for “husband’s name,” are marrying at a slightly later age, and edu- every festival has a role for wifely duty. cated urban women in particular may stay “This is a male-dominated society: As long single into their 30s, but there was no appre- as you have a father, brother, husband – you ciable rise in the number of women who did have standing,” she says. “Once you don’t not marry.

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The forum, however, is making incremen- it didn’t matter that she had nowhere to tal headway. Last year the women obtained go. She did construction labour to sup- a rare meeting with Sonia Gandhi, the head port the children, and a bit of tailoring, and of the ruling Indian National Congress party squeezed in the hours to earn a high-school and the country’s most famous widow. She diploma. heard them out sympathetically, Ms. Srivas- But while it was widely known that her tava says, and asked some canny questions. cheating husband had beaten her, it was Ms. Then she wrote a quick note on their file Prathnik who was shunned in the commu- and within hours, the Minister of Family nity: “They made my life miserable – I was Welfare was on the phone asking to meet taunted, I was called a tainted woman, my them. sisters-in-law made it almost impossible for The minister, Ms. Srivastava recalls, me to step outside my house.” Eventually, seemed horrified to learn about the mea- she says, she stopped talking altogether, and sly pension her ministry pays out, and the hardly said a word untilshe heard about the women’s lack of property rights. As is the forum a decade later and went to a meeting. chronic problem, she seemed never to have And that was the start of her new life. thought about single women before. “By now I’ve become strong. I don’t bother Both the government and UN Women sent today – they must still be gossiping.” Ms. representatives to the national gathering Prathnik is a woman on a mission, person- this year. The forum, with 50,000 members, ally supporting victims of abuse (150 so far) is growing fast. Ms. Srivastava says that its to make the choice she did. “I’m working greatest value may be in the new family it towards my goal of making women stronger gives its members, who often find that when and they can live in the outside world.” they are spurned by their former in-laws, When Saraswati Singh was young and still their natal family shuns them too. startling people with her defiant plan not to Komal Prathnik was married as a teenager marry, she taught herself to ride a bike and to a young man her father chose in Rajast- used it to travel through the area. People han. He was an alcoholic who beat her – her hurled insults at her. “I didn’t bother, I did arms and chest still bear the scars – and she what I wanted to do,” she says with a satis- left him when the youngest of their three fied smile. children was one. She would have gone Yet still when she shows up at a commu- sooner, she says, but her own family told nity event, no one offers her a chair. Men her they would not take her back. Finally, discourage their wives from associating with

93 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india her, alleging she is of dubious morals. “The issue is that once you are married people [say] ‘she has a guard, she is con- trolled’ – but the person who is not married, she is not controlled, she can go anywhere she wants to. So she is ‘characterless.’ ” Moral- ity, she says, is still a powerful tool for con- trolling women. There are lonely nights when she doubts her decision to stay single, but that feeling always passes, she says. “I’ve met the Prime Minister, I’ve met ministers – I’ve been every- where, lobbying. I’m proud of myself that I’ve done all this. I’m single but I’m not alone.” And she sees change coming. “Young girls … are now interested to know their rights, to talk, to fight,” she says, crossing her arms in satisfaction. “Now the roads are jammed with girls on bikes – and even driving cars.”

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PHOTO: STEPHANIE NOLEN

Girls Interrupted

Stephanie Nolen continues her award-winning series on the plight of ‘untouchables’ in India by investigating another roadblock to real change for women: Despite the country’s race to modernize, parents still see a girl’s best prospect as matrimony, not education. Many are glad to marry them off as young as 13, despite today’s laws against taking child brides The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

GAYA, INDIA – Seven girls went missing. tom rung of the Hindu caste system, which Last fall, Sudha Varghese sent 100 stu- remains rigidly in force in this marginalized dents from Prerna II, her residential school corner of India. for girls here in the northeast state of Bihar, A couple of semesters at Prerna can have home to celebrate the Hindu festival of a transformative effect - students are well Dushera. Ten days later, only 93 returned. fed for the first time, able to bathe each day, And the veteran social activist and educator wear crisp new uniforms and, most impor- suspected that she knew why. tant, have the scorn heaped upon their caste Nine months earlier, when the families replaced with affection and respectful inter- came to drop off their daughters, some as est in their ideas. They bloom, these girls, young as 8, at the school’s grand opening, transforming in a way that is a joy to behold. Sister Sudha had given parents a warm wel- Unless you are their parents. For them, come, and a stern warning. “Your girls might it’s terrifying. It is against the law in India look small today, but the school environ- for any girl to wed before she is 18 (or boy ment, regular meals and sports - all of these before he is 21), but it is the tradition, and things will make them grow faster,” she told still the practice, of the Mushahar to marry them. off their daughters at 12 or 13. The practice “In five or six years, they will start look- is not confined to the Mushahar: The figure ing big. But then don’t start thinking, ‘They for Bihar is 68 per cent, by far the nation’s have grown up and we have to get them highest. But almost half of all Indian girls, 43 married.’ You yourself would be taking your per cent, wed underage. daughter off of the path of education, and Like the dowry and the caste system, harming yourselves.” She spoke from expe- child marriage is a critical social issue for rience, having had the same problem when which India, in so many ways a beacon to the first Prerna opened in 2006. the developing world, has fine laws, but lax Sister Sudha and her remarkable schools enforcement. And while there is growing have appeared in The Globe and Mail regu- candour about the treatment of women - larly over the past year and a half in Break- seen in the recent furor over a gang rape ing Caste, a series highlighting the contin- in Delhi - the subject of immature brides is ued plight of young Dalits, the people once trapped in the past. known as “untouchable.” The schools are Sister Sudha is a Roman Catholic nun for girls from the Mushahar community, the from Kerala in India’s far south; she came lowest of the Dalits, consigned to the bot- to Bihar to work with the poor 46 years

96 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india ago. Within months, she had fled a hide- family’s honour and financial reprieve - has bound convent to live in a Dalit village, and proved tenacious. Sister Sudha has seen has dedicated her life to empowering the students leave and go, in a matter of weeks, Mushahar. from being voracious readers, staying up The girls, in particular, have become her late to study under a weak bulb, to child focus: She sees them, with the least power brides tending fires and pigs, soon damaged but huge potential, as the key to change in by pregnancies their bodies are too imma- communities where no adult has ever spent ture to carry safely. more than a year or two in school, and They are also too young to know how to women are frequent victims of harassment navigate the complicated dynamics of liv- and sexual assault. ing in domestic servitude to their husband’s India’s sexual violence epidemic captured family, and often face abuse. Once married, world attention recently when a 23-year-old they never go back to school. physiotherapy student was brutally gang- Over all, India’s child-marriage figures raped on a Delhi bus and died of her injuries are creeping downward - over the past 20 - but that grim story came as little shock years, there has been a 15-per-cent drop in here in Bihar, just over the border from the the number of girls married before 18 - but village the victim’s low-caste family had left among the Mushahar, the rate has hardly seeking a better life in the city. budged. And it threatens everything Sister The first of their kind, the Prerna schools Sudha is trying to achieve. (the name means “inspiration” in Hindi) Last fall, she waited a week or two and, have proved revolutionary, not just for the when the seven missing girls still did not girls, whose lives are turn from malnour- come back to school, she put out feelers in ished illiterate domestic drudgery into a the community. Her suspicions were soon glittering string of achievements, but also confirmed: In most cases, the parents were for their wider community, which is seeing reported to be looking for husbands. Dalit girls in a whole new way. In the past, when girls have been pulled Prerna students have won international from her schools to be married, Sister Sudha karate championships and district-wide art has tried, with varying degrees of success, contests, and been singled out by the Chief to talk parents out of it. At the first Prerna, Minister of Bihar for their accomplishments. near Patna, the state capital, the number But the notion that girls must marry before has declined each year, as the community they are 14 - for their own safety, for their gets used to the idea of an unwed 16-year-

97 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india old - and sees Sister Sudha’s protégées be- dust-caked children as if a spotlight were on coming teachers or public-health education her. workers, an unfathom- able idea a few years Everyone suspected why Sudha didi (she ago. This year all students at Prerna 1 re- is universally known here by the Hindi word turned after the holidays. for elder sister) had come. And quickly, in But the activist has grown weary of bad- voices barely lowered, they were advising gering parents. So this time, when the girls Guriya to lie. disappeared, she did something new - she Sister Sudha took the girl into her family’s went to the police. She had checked out the two-room, pink-walled mud house, and sent city’s new superintendent of police, and neighbours off to find her parents. “I’ve in- found Vinay Kumar to be unusually com- quired, and people say you are looking for a passionate, thoughtful and committed to match,” she said bluntly when they arrived. social justice. And in him, she thought she “No, no. It’s not true - she’s 13!” Guriya’s might have an ally. Perhaps a few arrests for mother, Lailun, protested. Like many others, “permitting child marriage” would jolt the the Manjis have heard about the law - the community into rethinking this practice. first legislation “restraining” child marriage dates from 1929 and the age for girls was set ‘You are looking for a match’ at 18 in 1978. But the latest law prohibiting the practice was enacted just over five years And so, on a crisp but sunny morning last ago, and only recently has Bihar’s develop- month, she set off for Kaleru Bhontoli, a ment-focused state government begun to Mushahar settlement outside Gaya, making advertise it. her way past a field of bright yellow mustard So, the Manjis knew what they were sup- plants, down a warren of small streets to the posed to say. But they do not know anyone home of Guriya Manji, one of the girls who who has ever been charged with marrying had not come back. an underaged girl. (There have been just a Her arrival drew all the neighbours out handful of convictions across India.) In fact, of their houses, but it was not difficult to they do not know any girls who were older spot Guriya, 13, in the crowd. Her hair was than 14 when they wed. Lailun is 31, give brushed in a shiny black bob just like she or take a few years (birth records for the learned at school, her brilliant pink salwar- Mushahar are a recent phenomenon), and kameez was crisp and clean, and she stood says she married at 13. out amid the grime and the tousle-haired, For 45 minutes, there was a circular, un-

98 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india easy conversation, Guriya staring fixedly at this girl is out of my way; it’s off my shoul- the floor and insisting in a tiny voice that it ders.” had been her idea not to go back to school. Sexual assault is a constant and very real fear - dominant-caste men view Mushahar ‘I got a frightening vision’ girls as easy prey who can be assaulted with no legal consequence, since police rarely And then her mother’s worries began to pursue complaints made by Dalits. A girl pour out. Lailun said the sight of her daugh- must be “chaste” if parents are to secure her ter grown tall and “fat” (which is to say, less a husband. And because a girl becomes the skeletally malnourished than other women property of her husband’s family, the sooner in the community) startled her when Guriya she and her dowry can be settled, the better, came home for the holiday. for parents anxious about this huge finan- “I got a frightening vision: If we leave her cial obligation. five years, what will she look like?” Neighbours and relatives squeezed into She knows that 18 is the legal age of mar- the room to offer their opinions, but Sister riage, but it’s so far off. “In five years, she Sudha sent them out again. She put the will grow bigger and I can’t keep an eye on question at last to Guriya: What do you her all the time, and what can happen?” she want to do? Study? Get married? asked. “So many things can happen. Some- The girl was rigid with anxiety and the one could misuse her sexually. Even she unaccustomed sensation of being given could get entangled with some boys who choices about her own life. “Don’t feel are around. Many things are being shown scared,” Sister Sudha said, briefly touching on TV and the young children imitate it. It’s her shoulder. “Don’t feel that you’re caught outside influences.” or trapped. What you want is the priority. She and her husband, Amit, are at work If there’s any problem with the school, a all day, hoeing and planting for a domi- reason that you didn’t want to come back, I nant-caste landowner, and cannot guard need to know so I can fix it.” her. At last, Guriya burst out: “It was better “All the girls her age are married - she’s there. I’m not happy at home. I would like the only who is not,” she said, wringing to study. I want to go back.” her hands. “It’s not right, but parents can’t But back was not part of the plan. Sister keep watch so they get them married.” Sudha had already given away her spot - Guriya’s father chimed in: “If I marry her, there are hundreds of girls on the waiting

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list. When the seven did not return by the will I face you,” she said. She had suspected new year, she replaced them. Her goal with that Guriya would not be allowed simply to this visit was not to bring Guriya back - she disappear. felt the family had had an opportunity, and Sister Sudha left the parents with a warn- wasted it - but a last attempt to keep her ing. “If I learn you are planning to get her from becoming a child bride. married, I’ll lodge a police complaint. For Sister Sudha constantly steels herself in five more years, you must give her educa- the face of the endless needs she confronts, tion.” but Guriya’s desperation softened her re- Back in the street, Sister Sudha had to solve. The nun’s brow crinkled as she tried laugh at the sight of Guriya, who was trying to work out how she could squeeze one and failing to maintain a serious expres- more girl into a dormitory already bursting sion; a grin pulled at the corners of the at its seams. “I’ll try to make an arrange- girl’s mouth and she was shivery with ex- ment - only for you,” she said finally. “It’s a citement. Climbing into her rattletrap jeep, last chance.” Sister Sudha said with a sigh that she could not be too angry with the parents, because the busybody neighbours remind her how difficult their choices are - to be the first generation to break from tradition, to send their children into a world they have no idea how to navigate. Her visit, she knows, may give the Manjis cover. Now, if people want to gossip or criti- cize them about Guriya, they can claim, “We would get her married, of course, but then PHOTO: STEPHANIE NOLEN we might end up in jail.” She turned then to Lailun. “You did not Until now, the problem with this tactic get a chance. Now, your daughter is get- has been the police themselves: The Bihar ting a chance. You shouldn’t say one word force, overworked, under-resourced and as to stop her. Give her a chance to have her embedded in caste prejudice as the society dream come true.” it nominally serves, has not traditionally Lailun, by then in tears, pulled up her concerned itself overmuch with the human shawl toward her eyes. “I was thinking, How rights of Dalits, certainly not Dalit school-

100 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india girls. Sister Sudha said she has fought for financially able to support the girl, or under years to have police take complaints of rape community pressure. First, we have to cre- and abuse seriously - if she reported a mar- ate awareness, so they don’t see their chil- riage done with the parents’ consent, she dren as a liability.” would be laughed out of the station. Over the next few days, Sister Sudha and But the soft-spoken and thoughtful po- her staff tried to track down the other girls lice chief now in charge of Gaya is cut from who did not come back, but these visits did different cloth. “Unless and until parents not go as well. take cognizance of the fact that getting Four hours’ drive west of Gaya in the tiny children married at such a young age has village of Dharmpur, they went looking for such adverse implications on their health four girls. One had been taken from Bihar to and their education, things will not change,” the big city, Kolkata, by her migrant-worker he said a few days after Sister Sudha sought father, and no one had news of them. But at out Guriya. “If we are educating the girl, we the Kumar home, they found Chand-ni, 14, are educating the whole family, and she is sitting morose and listless in the courtyard able to take care of the children she will give of the house her family shares with three birth to.” sets of uncles, aunts and their children. Asked why she was not back at Prerna, the Police ready to act family blustered - “She was sick! She’s going to a local school instead! Her mother has a These are startling observations from a new baby, and Chandni has to help!” But it Bihari police officer, but Supt. Kumar under- took about three minutes for the truth to stands Sister Sudha’s desire to use the law. come out - they were hunting for a husband. And if it comes to it, if parents push ahead Chandni has two cousins who also left Prer- with the marriages, he is ready to charge na, a 13-year-old for whom the family is also them. seeking a groom, and a nine-year-old whose But he hopes it won’t be necessary. “I mother decided not to send her because the don’t think it’s going to give a long-term older girls were not going. solution. ... When you are sending parents to Sister Sudha’s network of Dalit organiz- jail, who will take care of the children, who ers has only recently started to work in this are already very vulnerable? In most cases, area. None of the adults in this family - or the parents are [marrying them off] under the village, for that matter - had ever been certain circumstances - because they are not to school, and as they talked, it was clear

101 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india they saw little point in it. “We’re working people,” one aunt said with a shrug. “We have to work all day to feed ourselves.” All the adults, and some children, do agricul- tural day labour for about $2 a day. And what about the age-of-marriage law? Here, hours from a town, the idea that the police might concern themselves with a girl’s wedding is so alien as to be baffling. Chandni, when asked, said with a sigh that she misses playing, and studying at Prerna. She liked computer class, and karate. But she has three close friends in the village, and all now have husbands, so she knows what’s waiting for her. “I don’t want to be married yet,” she said with a burst of courage. “I want to study.” Her mother and aunts continued their conversation as if she had not spoken. The Prerna team left frustrated, with a sense there was little progress to be made in the short term. “We will have to do more to show them the possibilities that come with education,” Sister Sudha said after her staff reported back about Dharmpur. But for one of the lost girls, at least, there is a second chance. Sister Sudha squeezed an extra bed into the dorm, and a few weeks ago, Guriya put on her red and white uniform and went back to school.

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Can horror over rape change a culture?

A brutal sex attack prompts anger at patriarchal attitudes in a society – often citing women’s independence as source of misfortune The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

NEW DELHI – She was the 637th case of rape the movies with a male friend, a 28-year-old the police registered this year in the Indian software engineer, and they caught what capital. they thought was a city bus home around 9 But the story of this young woman - found p.m. naked and near death after being gang Police say the “conductor” collected 10 raped on a bus Sunday night - seems to have rupees - about 20 cents - from them for pierced the pained resignation of Indian tickets and then taunted her, saying that women and the men in their lives as few only prostitutes are out in the streets after similar crimes previously have. dark. Her friend tried to intervene. Then the The attack has prompted feverish debate conductor, driver and four friends - who had in parliament, with female members weep- posed as passengers on what was actually a ing in rage and vowing to bring change. chartered bus - first beat him senseless with There have been days of street demonstra- iron bars, then attacked the young woman, tions in the capital and beyond, with crowds while the vehicle cruised through south demanding the death penalty for the rap- Delhi, past some of India’s most elite uni- ists and fierce young women denouncing a versities and research centres. The hospital “sick” patriarchal culture. said Thursday that after a second surgery, And this rape has ignited a new debate they were unable to save any of her intes- about how safe women can expect to be in tinal system. She was briefly conscious on this rapidly changing nation. On Thursday, Wednesday; she wrote a note asking doctors protests and vigils in support of the victim to save her, and one to tell her parents she spread beyond New Delhi to other cities. wanted to live, the hospital said. The woman fighting for her life in a Delhi She was found on the road barely 100 me- hospital is a denizen of the new India: She tres from one of the city’s frenetic 24-hour comes from a poor family and her parents news channels, and soon her story dominat- sold their small parcel of land in Uttara- ed the media. Irate members of parliament khand in the north to help fund her dream disrupted the session on Tuesday, demand- of becoming a doctor, according to Meira ing the government explain why women Kumar, the speaker of India’s parliament, were not safe in the city. The next day, there who met them in the intensive-care unit. were demonstrations outside police sta- The young woman recently completed a tions, on the highway and outside the chief physiotherapy degree and was soon to start minister’s home in Delhi. an internship; on Sunday night, she went to Police said they have arrested four of six

104 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india men they believe, based on closed-circuit She referred to a series of incidents in the television footage from around the city, states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, which were involved, and that two have confessed surround Delhi, where in recent months to the crime, saying they went out for a khap panchayat, self-appointed local coun- night of “fun” after drinking. cils, have issued decrees variously banning The outraged media coverage of this latest women from wearing jeans and using mo- attack has recycled the popular idea that bile phones. Delhi is the country’s “rape capital,” but There has been fierce debate here this the statistics reflect that it has better rape year, following other high-profile rapes, reporting than any part of the country. The about women’s “responsibility.” Women Centre for Social Research, which works assaulted leaving bars or late at night or with Delhi police to offer rape crisis support, while wearing Western clothes have been estimates that one in 10 sexual assaults in chastised by police, judges and politicians Delhi are reported. In less developed states for bringing their misfortune on themselves. such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, “you hear This time, however, there is a current of de- of one in 25, and one in 100 is reported fiance in the protests, noted Subhashini Ali to police,” because of the widely held be- of the All India Democratic Women’s Asso- lief that a woman raped is permanently ciation. A young woman in central Delhi on shamed, said Ranjana Kumari, director of Tuesday carried a sign saying, “Stop telling the centre. me how to dress, start telling your sons not There are approximately 40,000 cases of to rape.” sexual assault pending before courts across But rape is still not seen as a men’s issue, India, according to the centre, cases which Ms. Ali said. “I don’t think many people are have dragged on for eight or nine years; asking that question yet [of how men are most of the accused are out on bail. being brought up and how it shapes their However, there is a particular dynamic in attitude toward rape].” the capital that is making women vulner- “But that’s where we have to go.” able, Dr. Kumari said. “The higher level of mobility of women - more independent, self-minded, strong women - their presence is very overwhelming for some set of people who are totally patriarchal, in a macho cul- ture,” she said.

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Rape victim’s death “Every girl and woman has the right to be renews anger, sorrow respected, valued and protected,” Mr. Ban and calls for change said in a statement in which he welcomed efforts by the government but called for NEW DELHI – The young woman who, much “further steps and reforms to deter such against her will, briefly became India’s most crimes and bring perpetrators to justice.” famous citizen was cremated in the pre- Protests continued throughout the week- dawn cold near her home in Delhi on Sun- end against rape, abuse of women, poor day, with senior politicians standing beside policing, and an overstretched ineffective her shattered family. justice system. But even as angry citizens The 23-year-old student died Saturday demanded more from their government, a morning of injuries sustained during a sav- watchdog group made public its research age gang rape carried out by six young men showing that men charged with violent on a moving bus on December 16. She had crimes against women hold political office been flown to Singapore for treatment two across the country. days before, a controversial decision made The Association for Democratic Reforms, by the central government, and on Saturday a non-partisan, non-profit organization, night a state aircraft was sent from Delhi to said at least two members of the national fly her body home. parliament face sexual assault charges. Her family was met at the airport by Sonia According to its findings, six state MPs are Gandhi, chief of the ruling Indian National charged with rape, while 36 other local poli- Congress, and Prime Minister Manmohan ticians face charges of other crimes against Singh. The government appears belatedly women and girls including “molestation.” to have realized that, in a country where Every party has fielded candidates facing violence against women is so commonplace charges of crimes against women; parties as to go almost unremarked, this case has have put 27 candidates who face rape charg- elicited a level of rage unprecedented in re- es on their state election tickets in the past cent years. Her cremation was kept closed to five years, the association said, based on its media and the public, and held immediately analysis of the candidates’ own registration after the family’s return. affidavits. (Of the 552 members in India’s The case has garnered international at- lower house of parliament, 162 face criminal tention, and the United Nations Secretary charges of some kind.) General, Ban Ki-moon, weighed in Sunday. In Delhi, no mass demonstrations oc-

106 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india curred over the weekend, as police acted on come from a low-caste community, is said to the central government’s orders to keep the have doted on her and been hugely proud of heart of the city sealed off. her academic achievements. She was about Instead small protests, of 1,000 people or to complete a physiotherapy degree and so, dotted the city, with candlelight vigils dreamed of being a doctor; her parents had Sunday night in dozens of neighbourhoods. sold their family land, and mortgaged a last The bus stop where the young woman and plot back in Uttar Pradesh, according to The a male friend caught what they thought was Hindu newspaper, to finance her studies. a city bus home after a movie has become Several media outlets reported Sunday a place of pilgrimage, drawing crowds with that she was in the process of planning a candles. Demonstrations were also held in February wedding to the young man who Mumbai, Patna, Chennai, Bangalore and was with her during the attack. He was also other parts of India. severely injured and is recovering with fam- Police have charged the six men, one of ily. them a minor, with murder, and the govern- The level of care, including psychological ment has appointed a special prosecutor support, that the young woman received to lead the case, which it promised to fast- after her attack, and the swift arrest of her track. Of 635 rapes reported in Delhi up to assailants, showed what the Indian system November this year, one has led to a convic- is capable of when there is political will to tion so far. respond to rape, noted Meenakshi Gan- Indian media, prevented by law from guly, South Asia director for Human Rights identifying the woman, are walking a fine Watch. line, providing a stream of details from in- But many victims battle to get police to terviews with people they say were her close register complaints. “They often go from friends, neighbours and relatives in her fam- one hospital to another even for a medical ily’s ancestral village in Uttar Pradesh. examination, and report suffering humili- They described a fiercely determined ation at police stations and hospitals,” she student whose light was always the last said. India continues, for example, to em- one burning in the low-income neighbour- ploy a “two finger test,” in which a doctor hood near the airport where she reportedly inserts fingers into a rape victim’s vagina to shared a one-bedroom apartment with her test for what is termed “vaginal laxity,” or parents and two brothers. Her father, re- the presence of a hymen, since her sexual ported to be a loader at the airport and to history is believed to have strong influence

107 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india on her credibility. Marital rape is legal in India, while the theoretical minimum seven-year-sentence for rape is routinely reduced by judges in the relatively few cases that end up in court.

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Five years in India:

False miracles and real inspiration

The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen was posted to India when the world was hailing its economic rise, which was expected to lead to social transformation. But the country’s gross inequities of class and gender, and its reluctance to confront them, made her fear it would defy those expectations. As she departs for her next assignment, she recalls a place that drove her to despair, and the hope she discovered in one of its lowliest corners The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india

It had been a very bad week. of the Bihari capital, Patna. He’d described A couple of years into my assignment in her work as revolutionary. So I had the taxi India, I went to Bihar, the country’s poor- stop in the town of Danapur, tracked down est state, to report on the development the address – a plain, red, metal gate – and miracle that was said to be going on under stepped inside. its new government. I saw new roads, new I found myself in a playing field full of schools, new toilets and newly minted health schoolgirls, caught up in a boisterous game workers, all emblematic of the sort of rapid of tag. When they saw me, they froze. Then change that was supposed to be sweeping they turned, put their hands together in a the country. quick, respectful greeting – “pranam, didi” – But I also met families of landless agri- and went right back to running. cultural labourers who lived in windowless, These girls were so strong, and so confi- low-roofed mud huts that would barely holds dent – so unlike any of the people I’d met pigs. I saw a young couple sit down to their over the past few days. I ventured up the one meal that day: a pot of insect-speckled, path and in the door, and met the school’s four-day-old rice. A local official took me founder, Sudha Varghese. She told me I had to a showpiece village for Dalits, the people come to the Prerna Residential School for once known as untouchables – then recoiled Mahadalit Girls. Those wild, free, creatures in visible disgust when one of the residents in the schoolyard were Dalit girls, a fact that almost brushed his sleeve by accident. made their sense of joyful inhibition even In village after village, I met people living harder to believe. in conditions more grim, more horrifying Sister Sudha has made it her life’s work to than almost any I had seen in 20 years of square the shoulders and raise the chins of reporting that had taken me from the AIDS- these girls, these most marginalized citizens ravaged highlands of Lesotho to dust-baked in the poorest corner of India. Within a few southern Afghanistan. After a couple of days, minutes of sitting down across from her bat- I was nearly speechless with despair: If this tered wooden desk, my despair began to melt was India’s beacon of progress, well, the gods away. help us all. The word prerna means “inspiration” in With a couple of hours left before my flight Hindi, and that school became mine: the back to Delhi, desperate for even a fragment vehicle for the most important stories I tried of good news, I decided to look up an activist to tell in nearly five years as a correspondent a friend had told me about on the outskirts in India.

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It wasn’t immediately clear which stories cities. And there were stories to tell from the those would be. Certainly there was no other India as well: the India of the 800 mil- shortage of breaking news to cover: Days lion people who still live in villages, and eke after I arrived in the country, a band of out a bare living on agriculture. young Pakistani men loaded down with But the Prerna school gave me a way to weapons sailed into the Mumbai harbor and write about the stories that lay underneath ran rampaging through the city. A couple many of these others. of hours after I had picked up keys to the Again and again, I went out to investigate new office, I was on a flight to Mumbai into an issue – why were 47 per cent of children the middle of that story. After that, the pace still malnourished, despite 15 years of roar- rarely slowed. ing growth? Why had India managed to I covered the largest election ever held slash its rate of HIV infection when African in the world, when 417.2 million Indians nations using the same methods had had voted in 2009. I reported on a nascent space no success? And again and again the answer program, and a massive Maoist insurgency. had to do with the status of women: Women I wrote about the steady ascendance of didn’t get to decide what their family grew women into local government because of an or bought or fed their children. Women’s audacious affirmative-action campaign; the mobility was so constrained that they could successes of the world’s biggest-ever public- never have an extramarital relationship, welfare scheme; and the craven robbery by and so never passed on HIV. officials that has crippled a food distribution In my first days in India, I was startled system meant to feed the hungry. by the absence of women in public spaces, There were big political stories – including save for the occasional portrait of a political corruption scandals of breathtaking scale – leader such as Sonia Gandhi smiling down and big business stories. Economic growth from the wall. That never lessened. But it has plummeted over my time here, from took longer for me to notice the endurance near 10 per cent per year to just over five per of caste – the ancient stratification of soci- cent, but that has scarcely dampened the ety by birth. voracious interest the rest of the world has Discrimination based on caste was out- in this ballooning economy, which just this lawed in 1950, yet nevertheless the caste year overtook Japan to become the world’s categories are now formally enshrined by third largest. When I arrived, the signs of government, because everything from sub- that growth were everywhere, at least in the sidized rice to college admissions to par-

111 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india liamentary seats are subject to caste-based system of discrimination grafting into a quotas. modern economy. A national survey in 2006 found that in And yet from day to day neither caste nor more than half of rural communities Dalits gender discrimination received more than were not permitted to enter non-Dalit cursory coverage in the local media. I rarely homes, to use the same laundry man or heard people talking about either, and when barber as non-Dalits, to go into the places of I wrote about these issues, officials at India’s worship, nor to share food or water or dish- Ministry of External Affairs summoned me es with non-Dalits. to politely berate my outdated coverage. Ah, people told me, but that’s the vil- “These are all things of the past – no one lages – it’s different in the cities. Tens of is concerned about these things any more,” thousands of people seem to want to be- a senior spokesman chided me. lieve that, because there are pages of name- But that’s not what I saw. One week I change advertisements in the newspapers covered the launch of the new BlackBerry each day – placed by migrants seeking to to a voracious Indian market in the high- leave their past behind by shedding their tech “millennium city” of Gurgaon, outside caste-revealing surnames. Delhi – and the next week I drove a couple But as I became more literate in the subtle of hours further down that road and cov- signs of how caste plays out in India today, ered a violent siege against Dalits in a vil- I began to see it everywhere: In the two sets lage where a dominant-caste woman had of dishes at the home of a friend, a senior eloped with a lower-caste man she’d met at executive in the supposedly caste-blind tech business school. It felt like time travel to the industry – there was a steel set kept for visi- Middle Ages. tors and workers of unknown caste. (This is called the “two tumbler” system.) In the The conventional wisdom in theories of way a street sweeper in a municipal-govern- economic development, largely born out by ment fluorescent vest pulled the end of her recent history, is that rapid growth will be sari out of the way lest it touch the suited accompanied by sweeping social transfor- workers walking by. mation. A senior civil servant confided that his In China, it came hand-in-hand with revo- colleagues, upon learning he came from lution. In 1960s Quebec, too, although the a Dalit family, refused to visit his Mumbai revolution was of a more peaceful kind. In home. Caste has proved resilient, an ancient Thailand and others of the so-called Asian

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Tigers, traditional feudal systems were perpower if it does not confront and change rapidly replaced with urbanized mobility. the enshrined ideas about women, and all In next-door Bangladesh, the growth of the the old forces that keep much of the popu- garment industry has created a vast class of lation shut out. women with waged work: badly paid, dan- “India will rise or fall with its women,” gerous work, but work that has given them she told a gathering of political, business much greater autonomy and shaken up all and cultural leaders at the Women in the the traditional ways things work there. World Summit recently. “It’s had a tradition Will India be the country that defies that of strong women leaders, but those women theory? As the Indian economy has grown, leaders – like women leaders around the its rate of female workforce participation world, like those who become presidents – already one of the lowest in the world, at or prime ministers or foreign ministers or 12 per cent – has declined further. Forty-six heads of corporations – cannot be seen as per cent of public places in rural India today tokens that give everyone else in society the maintain the two-tumbler system. chance to say, ‘We’ve taken care of our wom- There are many places – South Africa and en.’ So any country that wants to rise eco- Brazil, for example – where growth has been nomically and improve productivity needs accompanied by an increase in inequality to open the doors.” between the richest and the poorest. But in But maybe Ms. Clinton is wrong. Over all those places, the poorest, at least some the course of my years here, I have begun of them, have seen their own baseline im- to wonder if India will be the country that prove. In India, the basic indicators of qual- will grow and grow and never undergo that ity of life – child deaths, maternal mortality, transformative disruption. access to clean water and sanitation, qual- “Our prime minister likes to say that what ity of housing – have not budged for a vast India is achieving today has no parallel tranche of the populace. in human history – this pace of economic Seventy per cent of Indians still live on growth in an open society,” Harsh Mander, less than $2 a day. Less than 7 per cent a prominent Delhi-based social activist graduate from high school. who was recruited by Ms. Gandhi to advise There is a widespread belief outside In- her government, told me not long ago. He dia, put forth perhaps most often and most acknowledged with a gentle tip of his head eloquently by former U.S. Secretary of State that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was Hillary Clinton, that India cannot be a su- correct about that. “And yet we’re leaving

113 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india millions of our people behind.” to me; she knows this is my last visit to The people elected to power are utterly Prerna for a long time, and she will sweetly unmoved by this, he said. “When they drew tolerate my probing. up the new poverty line recently, they set it “What can you do?” I ask her. “What can at 32 rupees [six cents] a day. That means you do, in India today?” one rupee for health care.” It’s tantamount Poonam is from a group of Dalits called to ensuring that those now at the bottom Mushahar, the child of illiterate, landless stay there. “They feel the country can keep labourers who are so stunted by lifelong on without these things changing, because malnutrition that she towers over them it’s been fine until now.” when she goes back to visit, and she is not I wondered – as I sat on flights from Delhi tall herself. When she walks in the street to Mumbai as the only woman other than outside the school, neighbours will cross to the “air hostess” on a packed 747; when a the other side so her shadow does not touch Delhi woman with a Master’s in business theirs. confided which doctors would reveal the She is also a straight-A student with a gender of a fetus, to facilitate the aborting love of biology. An artist. A prize-winning of a girl; when a Harvard-educated busi- athlete. A trophy-holding debater. A canny ness owner told me “those people” (lower observer of the world around her. A secret castes) simply didn’t have the inherent writer of sappy poetry. And a child, who abilities to hold a professional position – cannot help but run when she comes into just what it would take for any change to an open space. She considers my question come. for a minute, fidgeting with the light pink dupatta draped over her shoulders. We are sitting in rough wooden chairs un- “The condition of women in the rural der a lazy fan, my friend Poonam and I, and areas is very bad, very uncertain,” she says we are having a conversation we have had in Hindi. “They have no choices, only to live many times before. It is late morning, blan- the way they live today. They have no work, keted with the heat of summer in Bihar. We no health care. For urban women or upper- are in the front room of the Prerna schol, caste women it’s not the same – they’re edu- and from upstairs come the murmurs of cated, they have jobs as teachers or nurses a math lesson, a scrape of benches on the or police officers. They have choices.” classroom floor. “Choices,” I say, nodding. “That’s a big Poonam, 16, is cutting class to sit and talk one. Getting to make your own.”

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Poonam carries on. “Girls like us, if we semi-conscious to the floor of the bus, they take the opportunity given to us, we can be- dragged Ms. Singh to the back and took come educated and get those jobs as teach- turns raping her – first using their own bod- ers and nurses. It all depends on what you ies, and later with iron rods that eviscerated do with the chance you’re given. It used to her. Eventually they dumped the pair by the be only for those others. Now we also have side of the road near a call centre, where that opportunity, if we take it. What used to employees coming off a night shift found be possible only for them is possible for us them. also.” Ms. Singh came from a low-caste family – not as low as Poonam’s, and not as poor, but After a couple of years of spending time people who had fought for the smallest toe- with Poonam, Sister Sudha and the girls of hold in the new India. Her parents had sold Prerna, I was nearly convinced: Every time their tiny plot of land in Uttar Pradesh, a few I left the school, I would sit on the evening miles from the Bihar border, and used the flight back to the congested, smoggy buzz of money to rent a two-room house in a Delhi Delhi, and feel newly hopeful about India’s slum and send their children to school. Ms. possibilities. Singh, in particular, had been their big hope. And then on the night of Dec. 16, 2012, a She justified their faith: She earned high 23-year-old Delhi physiotherapy student marks, tutored neighbourhood kids, got named Jyoti Singh went to see Life of Pi with into a professional college and got a call- a friend. Here is what happened next, as centre job to help pay for it. She went to later pieced together by police: They caught class all day, worked night shifts and barely what they thought was a private bus home, slept. She packed away the salwar-kurtas and for three hours it rolled through the people had worn back in the village, bought streets of the Indian capital, through five jeans and t-shirts and had her hair streaked. separate police posts, the curtains in its win- She died in hospital 10 days after the rape dows masking what went on inside. on the bus, after painstakingly recording a The passengers – actually friends of the statement for police (twice, because they driver, who had hijacked the school bus messed up the first one) and pleading with for a night of “fun” – set upon Ms. Singh them to catch the men who attacked her. and her friend. First they robbed them, and Something about this story – the brutal- then they began to beat them, and when ity of the men who attacked her, Ms. Singh’s the young man, a software engineer, fell courage, perhaps a camel’s-back frustration

115 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india with the constant tide of news of violence And then. “We hit the limits of empathy. against women – left people here enraged. Homeless women are being raped right here In the days after the attack, and especially every night,” he said, gesturing to the pave- after she died 10 days later, there was an ment outside his office window. “There are unprecedented outpouring of fury by many no demonstrations.” Indian women and the men who care about Even more disturbingly, there were fewer them. women around at all: After the attack on There were massive street demonstrations Ms. Singh, one in three female employees in in Delhi, which the panicked government the capital either reduced her hours or quit tried to shut down with barricades, sealed her job, according to a survey by the Asso- streets and water cannons. A conversation ciation of Chambers of Commerce of India. erupted in public, not only about sexual vio- When I went back to Prerna after Ms. lence but about harassment, sex-selective Singh’s death, I found it impossible to look abortion, dowry and the myriad other ways at the girls with the same optimism I had women are rendered unequal in this society. before. Jyoti Singh had tried plenty hard. It took place in the erudite pages of the She was focused. And look what happened English-language newspapers, but in many to her dreams. other places as well. The girls of Prerna went It made me terrified for these girls at to a candlelight vigil for Ms. Singh. They Prerna, about whom I’d come to care a great talked about rape. deal, and it also made me think they were But then, just as quickly as it had come, painfully deluded: Their hard work would the conversation faded away. never be enough. “On the positive side, it was a moment of And so when I went back to Bihar a few public empathy for a woman whose name weeks ago, to tell the girls I was headed to we didn’t know. There has been no mass South America to write about a new place, public upsurge because of violence against to thank them for their patience with me women anywhere before, ever,” Mr. Mander, and to explain that I wouldn’t be around so the activist, observed when we talked about much to poke my nose into their lives – I it in the spring. “You had the government couldn’t resist having the conversation with not knowing how to respond but it got its Poonam one more time. act together and created the committee [to look at modifying existing laws] and a lot of Sister Sudha sits with us, listening at first what it recommended was accepted.” and translating when my Hindi and Poon-

116 The Globe and Mail Presents: Out of india am’s English don’t quite meet in the middle, Poonam’s reply is lightening fast. “But and then taking over, gently probing Poo- that also is not safe – you get a husband nam’s ideas. who is not humane, he does not treat you “What about the future?” I ask, flinching well and you become a victim of violence.” a bit as I bring up Ms. Singh and her murder She goes on, thinking about home. “You on that Delhi bus. “What can a girl like you know, women in urban areas come together. do in India today?” But in villages they don’t because of the fear “I just have to be focused on my goal,” she of dominant castes.” answers quickly, as she has told me so many Sister Sudha is still pushing. “Even within times before. “Sometimes my friends call our own caste, people are exploited. Women me to come and chat with them and away are exploited by men.” from my books and I stop studying – but Poonam bristles. “They always blame the there is nothing else in my way.” girl. It’s always her fault. Nobody looks at “But as soon as you step out through that justice, who is wrong and who is right. Even gate, you’re not safe,” Sister Sudha says re- in my own home no one will stand up for flectively, waving towards the road outside me.” the school grounds. “Your gender makes She pauses for a minute and swings her you not safe.” legs back and forth a bit. She flips the du- “I’m safe in here, though.” patta up over her shoulder. She has a plan: “But you can’t stay here all your life” – Sis- “You have to get yourself educated and get a ter Sudha and I, in a chorus. livelihood, a job, a post.” With that, she says, “Where we’re unsafe, women must come she would have the ability to fend off every- together and raise their voices and speak one who tries to hold her back. out for change” – Poonam, deadly serious. So – I should be hopeful? I try to keep the dismay off my face; Poo- Poonam speaks with the same certainty I nam is staring hard at me. But it is hard to first heard from her years before, when we imagine change coming just because some chatted on my first visit to Prerna: “If I want, Dalit girls demand it. I can do it. If I want, I can be safe anywhere. “All around there are situations like this, I can be safe and I can manage.” the harassment and the violence,” says How? Sister Sudha again, playing devil’s advocate. “The key is resistance. Resisting what they “Better you should stay home and get mar- want, focusing on what I want.” ried and have your children.” “They. Who do you mean, they?”

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“Boys. Men. Society. The key is resistance.” She says it with a fierceness and a convic- tion that make her seem so much older than 16. That’s Poonam’s plan. Resistance. And I can’t help but feel hopeful when I hear it.

118 The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen

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